What is a philosophy?
At each stage in human history, men and women have worked out some sort of picture of the world and their place in it. They develop a philosophy. The pieces they use to make up this picture have been obtained by observing nature and through generalising their day-to-day experiences.
Some people believe they have no need of such a philosophy or world outlook. Yet in practice everyone has a philosophy, even if it is not consciously worked out. People who live by rule of thumb or ‘common sense’, and think they are doing without theory, in practice think in the traditional way. Marx and Engels once said that the dominant ideas of society are those of the ruling class.[1] To maintain and justify its rule, the capitalist class makes use of every available means to distort the consciousness of the worker. The school, church, TV and press are used to foster the ideology of the ruling class, and indoctrinate the worker into accepting their system as the most natural permanent form of society. In the absence of a conscious socialist philosophy, they accept unconsciously the capitalist one.
At each point in class society, the rising revolutionary class, aiming to change society, has to fight for a new world outlook and has to attack the old philosophy, which, being based on the old order, justified and defended it.
Idealism and materialism
Throughout the history of philosophy we find two camps: the idealist and the materialist. The common idea of ‘idealism’ (i.e. honesty, uprightness in the pursuit of ideals) and ‘materialism’ (i.e. base, greedy, money-grabbing egoism) has nothing to do with philosophical idealism and philosophical materialism.
Many great thinkers of the past were idealists, notably Plato and Hegel. This school of thought looks upon nature and history as a reflection of ideas or spirit. The theory that men, women and every material thing was created by a divine Spirit, is a basic concept of idealism. This outlook is expressed in a number of ways, yet its basis is that ideas govern the development of the material world. History is explained as a history of thought. People’s actions are seen as resulting from abstract thoughts, and not from their material needs. Hegel went one step further, being a consistent idealist, and turned thoughts into an independent ‘Idea’ existing outside of the brain and independent of the material world. The latter was merely a reflection of this Idea. Religion is part and parcel of philosophical idealism.
The materialist thinkers, on the other hand, have maintained that the material world is real and that nature or matter is primary. The mind or ideas are a product of the brain. The brain, and therefore ideas, arose at a certain stage in the development of living matter. The basic cornerstones of materialism are as follows:
First of all, the material world, known to us by our senses and explored by science, is real. The development of the world is due to its own natural laws, without any recourse to the supernatural.
Furthermore, there is only one world, the material one. Thought is a product of matter (the brain), without which there can be no separate ideas. Therefore minds or ideas cannot exist in isolation apart from matter. General ideas are only reflections of the material world. “With me”, wrote Marx, “the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”[2] And further: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”[3]
The idealists conceive of consciousness, of thought, as something external, and opposed to matter, to nature. This opposition is something entirely false and artificial. There is a close correlation between the laws of thought and the laws of nature, because the former follow and reflect the latter. Thought cannot derive its categories from itself, but only from the external world. Even the most seemingly abstract thoughts are in fact derived from the observation of the material world.
Even an apparently abstract science like pure mathematics has, in the last analysis, been derived from material reality, and is not spun from the brain. The schoolchild secretly counts his material fingers under a material desk before solving an abstract arithmetical problem. In doing so, he is recreating the origins of mathematics itself. We base ourselves upon the decimal system because we have ten fingers. The Roman numerals were originally based on the representation of fingers. According to Lenin:
This is materialism: matter acting on our sense organs produces sensation. Sensations depend upon the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e. on matter organised in a definite way. The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way.[4]
People are a part of nature, who develop their ideas in interaction with the rest of the world. Mental processes are real enough, but they are not something absolute, outside nature. They should be studied in their material and social circumstances in which they arise. As Marx and Engels stated:
The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.[5]
The origins of materialism
“The original home of all modern materialism”, wrote Engels, “from the seventeenth century onwards, is England.”[6] At this time, the old feudal aristocracy and monarchy were being challenged by the newly emerged middle classes. The bastion of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church, which provided the divine justification for the monarchy and feudal institutions. This, therefore, had to be undermined before feudalism could be overthrown. The rising bourgeoisie challenged the old ideas and divine concepts that the old order was based upon. Engels explains:
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle classes went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overstep the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all.[7*] Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and therefore, had to join in the rebellion.[8]
It was at this time that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) developed his revolutionary ideas of materialism. According to him, the senses were infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science was based upon experience, and consisted in subjecting the data to a rational method of investigation – induction, analysis, comparison, observation and experiment. It was, however, left to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to continue and develop Bacon’s materialism into a system. He realised that ideas and concepts were only a reflection of the material world, and (as Marx and Engels paraphrased) that “it is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks”.[9] Later, the English thinker John Locke (1632-1704) provided proof of this materialism.
The materialist school of philosophy passed from England to France, to be taken up and developed further by René Descartes (1596-1650) and his followers. These French materialists did not limit themselves to criticisms of religion, but extended them to all institutions and ideas. They challenged these things in the name of ‘Reason’, and gave ammunition to the developing bourgeoisie in their struggle with the monarchy. The birth of the bourgeois Great French Revolution of 1789-93 took as its creed materialist philosophy. Unlike the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, its French counterpart completely destroyed the old feudal order. As Engels later pointed out:
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie.[10]
The defect, however, of this materialism from Bacon onwards was its rigid, mechanical interpretation of nature. Not accidentally, the English school of materialist philosophy flourished in the eighteenth century, when the discoveries of Isaac Newton made mechanics the most advanced and important science. In the words of Engels:
[The] specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development.[11]
The French Revolution had a profound effect upon the civilised world, similar to the Russian Revolution of 1917. It revolutionised thinking in every field – politics, philosophy, science and art. The ferment of ideas emerging from this bourgeois democratic revolution ushered in advances in natural science, geology, botany and chemistry, as well as political economy.
It was in this period that a criticism was made of the mechanical approach of the materialists. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made the first breakthrough in the old mechanistic ways with his discovery that the Earth and the solar system had come into being, and had not existed eternally. The same also applies to geography, geology, plants and animals.
This revolutionary idea of Kant was comprehensively developed by another brilliant German thinker, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was a philosophical idealist, believing that the world could be explained as a manifestation or reflection of a ‘Universal Mind’ or ‘Idea’, i.e. some form of God.
Hegel looked upon the world not as an active participant in society and human history, but as a philosopher, contemplating events from afar. He set himself up as a measuring rod of the world, interpreting history according to his prejudices as the history of thought, the world as the world of ideas, an ‘Ideal World’. Thus for Hegel, problems and contradictions were posed not in real terms but in terms of thought, and could therefore find their solution only in terms of thought. Instead of contradictions in society being solved by the actions of men and women – by the class struggle – they instead find their solution in the philosopher’s head, in the Absolute Idea!
Nevertheless, Hegel recognised the errors and shortcomings of the old mechanistic outlook. He also pointed out the inadequacies of formal logic and set about the creation of a new world outlook which could explain the contradictions of change and movement.
Although Hegel rediscovered and analysed the laws of motion and change, his idealism placed everything on its head. It was the struggle and criticism of the Young Hegelians, led by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), which tried to correct and place philosophy back on its feet. Yet even Feuerbach – “a materialist below and an idealist above”[12] – was not able to fully purge Hegelianism of its idealist outlook. This work was left to Marx and Engels, who were able to rescue the dialectical method from its mystical shell. Hegelian dialectics were fused with modern materialism to produce the revolutionary understanding of dialectical materialism.
What is dialectics?
We have seen that modern materialism is the concept that matter is primary and the mind or ideas are the product of the brain. But what is dialectical thinking or dialectics?
Dialectics […] is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.[13]
The dialectical method of thinking already had a long existence before Marx and Engels developed it scientifically as a means of understanding the evolution of human society.
The ancient Greeks produced some great dialectical thinkers, including Plato, Zeno and Aristotle. As early as 500 bc, Heraclitus advanced the idea that “everything is and is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away”.[14] And further: “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” (Fragment 12.) This statement already contains the fundamental conception of dialectics that everything in nature is in a constant state of change, and that this change unfolds through a series of contradictions. As Engels explains:
The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the apparently stable things, no less than their mental images in our heads, the concepts, go through uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away…[15]
And further:
[For dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure against it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away, of ascending without end from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.[16]
Dialectics and metaphysics
The Greek philosophers brilliantly anticipated the later development of dialectics as of other sciences. But they could not themselves carry this anticipation to its logical conclusion, owing to the low development of the means of production and the lack of adequate information about the detailed workings of the universe. Their ideas gave a more-or-less correct general picture, but they were often more in the nature of inspired guesses than scientifically worked out theories. In order to carry human thought further, it was necessary to abandon these old methods to arrive at a general understanding of the universe, and concentrate on the smaller, more mundane tasks of collecting, sorting out and labelling a host of individual facts, of testing particular theories by experiment, of defining, etc.
From the time of the Renaissance, the empirical, experimental, factual approach provided an enormous boost to human thought and science. Investigations into the workings of nature could now be carried out scientifically, analysing each particular problem and testing each conclusion. But in the process, the old ability to deal with things in their connection and not separately, in their movement and not statically, in their life and not in their death, was lost. We term the narrow, empirical mode of thought which consequently arose the ‘metaphysical’ approach. It still dominates modern capitalist philosophy and science. In politics, it is reflected in Harold Wilson’s famous ‘pragmatism’ (“if it works, it must be right”), and the constant appeals to ‘the facts’.
But facts do not select themselves. They have to be chosen by individuals. The order and sequence in which they are arranged, and the conclusions drawn from them, depend upon the preconceived notions of the individual. Thus, such appeals for ‘the facts’, which are supposed to convey the impression of scientific impartiality, are usually just a smokescreen to conceal the prejudices of the speaker.
Dialectics deals not only with facts, but with facts in their connection, i.e. processes, not only with isolated ideas, but with laws, not only with the particular, but with the general.
As Trotsky explained in ‘The ABC of Materialist Dialectics’, dialectical thinking stands in the same relationship to metaphysics as a motion picture to a still photograph. The one does not contradict the other, but complements it. However, the truer, more complete approximation of reality is contained in the movie.
For everyday purposes and simple calculations, metaphysical thought, or ‘common sense’, suffices. But it has its limitations, and beyond these the application of ‘common sense’ turns truth into its opposite. The fundamental shortcoming of this type of thinking is its inability to conceive of motion and development, and its rejection of all contradiction. However, movement and change imply contradiction.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. […] For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.[17]
For everyday purposes, for instance, it is possible to say with a degree of certainty whether an individual, plant or animal is alive or dead. But in reality the question is not so simple, as legal cases on abortion and the “rights of the foetus” indicate. At what point precisely does human life begin? At what point does it end? Death is also not a simple event but a protracted process, as Heraclitus understood:
It is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former. (Fragment 88.)
Trotsky, in his ‘The ABC of Materialist Dialectics’, characterised the dialectic as “a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes.”[18]
He compared dialectics and formal logic (metaphysics) to higher and lower mathematics. It was Aristotle who first developed the laws of formal logic, and his system of logic has been accepted ever since by the metaphysicians as the only possible method of scientific thinking.
The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality ‘A’ is not equal to ‘A’. This is easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens – they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities: for instance, a pound of sugar. The objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar – a more delicate scale always discloses a difference. Again, one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true – all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves. A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself ‘at a given moment’. Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this ‘axiom’, it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we conceive the word ‘moment’? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that ‘moment’ to inevitable changes. Or is the ‘moment’ a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus, the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.
At first glance it could seem that these ‘subtleties’ are useless. In reality they are of decisive significance. The axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ appears on one hand to be the point of departure for all our knowledge, on the other hand the point of departure for all the errors in our knowledge. To make use of the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ with impunity is possible only within certain limits. When quantitative changes in ‘A’ are negligible for the task at hand, then we can presume ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This is, for example, the manner in which a buyer and a seller consider a pound of sugar. We consider the temperature of the sun likewise. Until recently we considered the buying power of the dollar in the same way. But quantitative changes beyond certain limits become converted into qualitative. A pound of sugar subjected to the action of water or kerosene ceases to be a pound of sugar. A dollar in the embrace of a president ceases to be a dollar. To determine at the right moment the critical point where quantity changes into quality is one of the most important and difficult tasks in all the spheres of knowledge, including sociology.[19]
Hegel
The old dialectical method of reasoning, which had fallen into disuse from medieval times on, was revived in the early nineteenth century by Hegel. One of the most encyclopaedic minds of his time, he subjected the forms of formal logic to a detailed criticism, and demonstrated their limitations and one-sidedness. Hegel produced the first really comprehensive analysis of the laws of dialectics, which served as a basis upon which Marx and Engels later developed their theory of dialectical materialism. Lenin characterised Hegelian dialectics as “the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development”.[20] In comparison with this, every other formulation was “one-sided and poor in content, and could only distort and mutilate the actual course of development (which often proceeds in leaps, catastrophes and revolutions) in nature and in society”.[21] As Lenin explains, Hegel’s view of things was that of:
A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (‘the negation of negation’), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; ‘breaks in continuity’; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws – these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one.[22]
And as Engels explains:
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system – and herein is its great merit – for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e. as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment-seat of mature philosophic reason, and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible; but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.[23]
Hegel brilliantly posed the problem, but was prevented from solving it by his idealist preconceptions. It was, in Engels’ words “a colossal miscarriage”.[24] Despite its mystical side, Hegel’s philosophy already explained the most important laws of dialectics: quantity and quality, the interpenetration of opposites and negation of the negation.
Quantity and quality
The idea of change and evolution is now generally accepted, but the forms by which changes occur in nature and society have only been explained by Marxian dialectics. The common view of evolution as a peaceful, smooth and uninterrupted development is both one-sided and false. In politics it is the ‘gradualist’ theory of social change – the basic theoretical plank of reformism.
Hegel developed the idea of a “nodal line of measure relations”:
… in which, at certain definite nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap; for example, in the case of heated or cooled water, where boiling-point and freezing-point are the nodes at which – under normal pressure – the leap to a new state of aggregation takes place, and where consequently quantity is transformed into quality.[25]
Thus, in the example cited, the transformation of water from a liquid to vapour or solid ice do not occur by a gradual congealing or dissipation, but suddenly at a particular temperature (0°C, 100°C). The cumulative effect of numerous changes of the speed of the molecules eventually produces a change of state – quantity into quality. As Engels explains:
In spite of all gradualness, the transition from one form of motion to another always remains a leap, a decisive change.[26]
Examples may be produced at will, from all the branches of science, from sociology and even from everyday life (e.g. the point at which the addition of salt changes the soup from something palatable to something inedible).
The Hegelian nodal line of measurement and the law of the transition of quantity into quality and vice-versa are of crucial importance not only to science (where, like other dialectical laws, they are used unconsciously by scientists who are not conscious dialecticians) but above all in an analysis of history, society and the movement of the working class.
The interpenetration of opposites
Just as ‘common sense’ metaphysics seeks to eliminate contradiction from thought and revolution from evolution, it also tries to prove that all opposing ideas and forces are mutually exclusive. However, as Engels explains:
… we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.[27]
Dialectics is the science of interconnections, in contrast to metaphysics which treats phenomena as separate and isolated. Dialectics seeks to uncover the countless threads, transitions, causes and effects which bind the universe together. The first task of a dialectical analysis is therefore, as Lenin explains, to trace the “necessary connection, the objective connection of all the aspects, forces, tendencies etc., of the given sphere of phenomena.”[28]
Dialectics approaches a given phenomenon from the point of view of its development, its own movement and life; how it arises and how it passes away; it also considers the internal contradictory tendencies and sides of this thing.
Motion is the mode of existence of the entire material universe. Energy and matter are inseparable. Furthermore, motion is not imparted ‘from without’, but the manifestation of the internal tensions that are inseparable not only from life, but from all forms of matter. Development and change takes place through internal contradictions. Thus, dialectical analysis begins by laying bare, by empirical investigation, the inner contradictions which give rise to development and change.
From the dialectical standpoint, all ‘polar opposites’ are one-sided and inadequate, including the contradiction between ‘truth and error’. Marxism does not accept the existence of any ‘eternal truths’. All ‘truths’ and ‘errors’ are relative. What is true in one time and context becomes false in another: truth and error pass into each other.
Thus, the progress of knowledge and science does not proceed from the mere negation of ‘incorrect theories’. All theories are relative, grasping one side of reality. Initially they are assumed to have universal validity and application. They are ‘true’. But at a certain point, deficiencies in the theory are noticed – they are not applicable to all circumstances, exceptions to the rule are found. These have to be explained, and, at a certain point, new theories are developed which can account for the exceptions. But the new theories not only ‘negate’ the old, but incorporate them in a new form.
We can exclude contradictions only by regarding objects as lifeless, at rest, and individually juxtaposed, i.e. metaphysically. But as soon as we consider things in their motion and change, in their life, their mutual interdependence and interaction, we come up against a series of contradictions.
Motion itself is a contradiction between being in the same place and somewhere else at the same time. Life, equally, is a contradiction that “a being is at each moment itself and yet something else”.29
Living structures constantly absorb substances from the environment, assimilate them and simultaneously other parts of the body decay, disintegrate and are expelled. Constant transformations occur also in the world of organic nature, for example a rock which disintegrated under the pressure of the elements. Everything is therefore constantly itself and something else at one and the same time. Thus, the desire to eliminate contradictions is the desire to eliminate reality.
Negation of the negation
The law of the negation of the negation deals with the nature of development through a series of contradictions, which appear to annul, or negate a previous fact, theory, or form of existence, only to be later negated in its turn. Motion, change and development thus moves through an uninterrupted series of negations. Engels characterises this law as:
An extremely general – and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important – law of development of nature, history, and thought; a law which, as we have seen, holds good in the animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy…[30]
This law, the workings of which were observed in nature long before it was written down, was first clearly elaborated by Hegel, who gives a whole series of concrete examples, which are reiterated by Engels in Anti-Dühring.
However, negation in the dialectical sense does not signify a mere annulment or obliteration, rather it is a development whereby the earlier stage is both overcome and preserved at the same time. Negation, in this sense, is both a positive and a negative act.
Hegel gives a simple example in his book, The Phenomenology of the Mind:
The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.[31]
In this process of endless self-annulment, the disappearance of certain forms and the emergence of others, a pattern frequently emerges which seem to be a repetition of forms, events and theories already surpassed. Thus, it is a commonplace that “history repeats itself”. Reactionary bourgeois historians have thus tried to prove that history itself is merely a meaningless repetition, proceeding in a never-ending circle.
Dialectics, on the contrary, discerns within these seeming repetitions an actual development from lower to higher, an evolution in which the same forms may repeat themselves, but on a higher level, enriched by previous developments.
This can be seen most clearly from the process of development of human ideas. Hegel already showed how philosophy developed through a series of contradictions, with one school of thought negating another, but simultaneously absorbing the older theories into its own system of thought.
Similarly with the development of science. The alchemists of the Middle Ages were motivated for the search for the ‘philosophers’ stone’ which could turn base metal into gold. Owing to the low level of the productive forces and the lack of scientific technique, these early attempts at the ‘transmutation’ of the elements was in reality a utopian fantasy. However, in the process of these vain attempts, the alchemists actually discovered a whole series of valuable facts about chemicals and experimental apparatus which later provided the basis of modern chemistry.
With the rise of capitalism, industry and technique, chemistry became a science, which rejected the early ‘crazy’ notions of the transmutation of the elements which was thus negated. However, all that was valuable and scientific in the discoveries of alchemy were preserved in the new chemistry, which maintained that the elements were ‘immutable’ and could not be transformed one into another.
The twentieth century has seen the revolutionising of science and technique with the discovery of nuclear physics, by means of which one element can actually be transformed into another. In fact, it would be theoretically possible to turn lead into gold, in modern times, but the process would be too expensive to be justified economically. Thus, this particular process seems to have turned full circle: Transmutation of elements → non-transmutation of elements → transmutation of elements.
But the repetition is only apparent. In reality, modern science, which in one sense has returned to an idea of the ancient alchemists, includes within itself all the enormous discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, one generation stands on the shoulders of another. Ideas which have apparently been ‘disproved’ or ‘negated’ make their reappearance, but on a higher level, enriched by the previous experiences and discoveries.
Dialectics bases itself upon determinism: the thought that nothing in nature, society or thought is accidental – that seeming ‘accidents’ arise only as the result of a deeper necessity.
Superficial historians have written that the First World War was ‘caused’ by the assassination of a Crown Prince at Sarajevo. To a Marxist this event was a historical accident, in the sense that this chance event served as the pretext, or catalyst, for the world conflict which had already been made inevitable by the economic, political and military contradictions of imperialism. If the assassin had missed, or if the Crown Prince had never been born, the war would still have taken place, on some other diplomatic pretext. Necessity would have expressed itself through a different ‘accident’.
Everything which exists, exists of necessity. But, equally, everything which exists is doomed to perish, to be transformed into something else. Thus what is ‘necessary’ in one time and place becomes ‘unnecessary’ in another. Everything begets its opposite which is destined to overcome and negate it. This is true of individual living things as much as societies.
Every type of human society exists because it is necessary at the given time when it arises. As Marx explains:
No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.[32]
Slavery, in its day, represented an enormous leap forward over barbarism. It was a necessary stage in the development of productive forces, culture and human society. As Hegel put it:
It is not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated.[33]
Similarly, capitalism was originally a necessary and progressive stage in human society. However, like slavery, primitive communism and feudalism, capitalism has long since ceased to represent a necessary and progressive social system. It has foundered upon the deep contradictions inherent in it, and is doomed to be overcome by the rising forces of socialism, represented by the modern proletariat. Private ownership of the means of production and the nation state, the basic features of capitalist society, which originally marked a great step forward, now serve only to fetter and undermine the productive forces and threaten all the gains made in centuries of human development.
Capitalism is now a thoroughly decrepit, degenerate social system, which must be overthrown and replaced by its opposite – socialism – if human culture is to survive. Marxism is determinist, but not fatalist, because the working out of contradictions in society can only be achieved by men and women consciously striving for the transformation of society. This struggle of the classes is not pre-determined. Who succeeds depends on many factors, and a rising, progressive class has many advantages over the old, decrepit force of reaction. But ultimately, the result must depend upon which side has the stronger will, the greater organisation and the most skilful and resolute leadership.
The Marxist philosophy is therefore essentially a guide to action, as Marx stated:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.[34]
The victory of socialism will mark a new and qualitatively different stage of human history. To be more accurate, it will mark the end of the prehistory of the human race, and start a real history.
However, on the other hand, socialism marks a return to the earliest form of human society – tribal communism – but on a much higher level, which stands upon all the enormous gains of thousands of years of class society. The economy of superabundance will be made possible by the application of socialist planning to the industry, science and technique established by capitalism, on a world scale.
This in turn will once and for all make redundant the division of labour, the difference between mental and manual labour, between town and countryside, and the wasteful and barbaric class struggle, and enable the human race at last to set its resources to the conquest of nature. It is, to use Engels’ famous phrase, “humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”[35]
The dialectic is neither fiction nor mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between higher and lower mathematics.
I will here attempt to sketch the substance of the problem in a very concise form. The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality ‘A’ is not equal to ‘A’.
This is easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens – they are quite different from each other.
But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities: for instance, a pound of sugar.
The objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar – a more delicate scale always discloses a difference.
Again, one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true – all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves.
A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself ‘at a given moment’. Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this ‘axiom’, it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we conceive the word ‘moment’? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that ‘moment’ to inevitable changes.
Or is the ‘moment’ a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence.
Thus, the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.
At first glance it could seem that these ‘subtleties’ are useless. In reality they are of decisive significance. The axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ appears on one hand to be the point of departure for all our knowledge, on the other hand the point of departure for all the errors in our knowledge.
To make use of the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ with impunity is possible only within certain limits. When quantitative changes in ‘A’ are negligible for the task at hand, then we can presume ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This is, for example, the manner in which a buyer and a seller consider a pound of sugar. We consider the temperature of the sun likewise. Until recently we considered the buying power of the dollar in the same way. But quantitative changes beyond certain limits become converted into qualitative. A pound of sugar subjected to the action of water or kerosene ceases to be a pound of sugar. A dollar in the embrace of a president ceases to be a dollar. To determine at the right moment the critical point where quantity changes into quality is one of the most important and difficult tasks in all the spheres of knowledge, including sociology.
Every worker knows that it is impossible to make two completely equal objects. In the elaboration of bearing-brass into cone bearings, a certain deviation is allowed for the cones which should not, however, go beyond certain limits (this is called tolerance). By observing the norms of tolerance, the cones are considered as being equal (‘A’ is equal to ‘A’). When the tolerance is exceeded, the quantity goes over into quality; in other words, the cone bearings become inferior or completely worthless.
Our scientific thinking is only a part of our general practice, including techniques. For concepts there also exists ‘tolerance’ which is established not by formal logic issuing from the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ but by dialectical logic issuing from the axiom that everything is always changing. ‘Common sense’ is characterised by the fact that it systematically exceeds dialectical ‘tolerance’.
Vulgar thought operates with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers’ state, etc., as fixed abstractions, presuming that capitalism is equal to capitalism, morals are equal to morals, etc. Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state.
The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of reality, which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretisations, a richness of content and flexibility, I would even say a succulence, which to a certain extent brings them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a given workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.
Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph, but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. Hegel in his Logic established a series of laws: change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks.
Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation, although by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.
We call our dialectic materialist since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our ‘free will’, but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebula. On all the rungs of this ladder of development the quantitative changes were transformed into qualitative. Our thought, including dialectical thought, is only one of the forms of the expression of changing matter. There is place within this system for neither God, nor Devil, nor immortal soul nor eternal norms of laws and morals. The dialectic of thinking, having grown out of the dialectic of nature, possesses consequently a thoroughly materialist character.
Darwinism, which explained the evolution of species through quantitative transformations passing into qualitative, was the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter. Another great triumph was the discovery of the table of atomic weights of chemical elements and further the transformation of one element into another.
With these transformations (species, elements, etc.) is closely linked the question of classifications, just as important in the natural as in the social sciences. Linnaeus’ system (eighteenth century), utilising as its starting point the immutability of species, was limited to the description and classification of plants according to their external characteristics.
The infantile period of botany is analogous to the infantile period of logic, since the forms of our thought develop like everything that lives. Only decisive repudiation of the idea of fixed species, only the study of the history of the evolution of plants and their anatomy prepared the basis for a really scientific classification.
Marx, who in distinction from Darwin was a conscious dialectician, discovered a basis for the scientific classification of human societies in the development of their productive forces and the structure of the relations of ownership, which constitute the anatomy of society. Marxism substituted for the vulgar descriptive classification of societies and states, which even up to now still flourishes in the universities, a materialistic dialectical classification. Only through using the method of Marx is it possible correctly to determine both the concept of a workers’ state and the moment of its downfall.
All this, as we see, contains nothing ‘metaphysical’ or ‘scholastic’, as conceited ignorance affirms. Dialectical logic expresses the laws of motion in contemporary scientific thought. The struggle against materialist dialectics on the contrary expresses a distant past conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, the self-conceit of university routinists and… a spark of hope for an afterlife.
Out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, however, there developed still another tendency, the only one which has borne real fruit. And this tendency is essentially connected with the name of Marx.
The separation from Hegelian philosophy was here also the result of a return to the materialist standpoint. That means it was resolved to comprehend the real world – nature and history – just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist crotchets. It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice every idealist which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this. But here the materialistic world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and was carried through consistently – at least in its basic features – in all domains of knowledge concerned.
Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, a start was made from his revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form, this method was unusable. According to Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept does not only exist – unknown where – from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. It develops into itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated at length in the Logic and which are all included in it. Then it ‘alienates’ itself by changing into nature, where, unconscious of itself, disguised as a natural necessity, it goes through a new development and finally returns as man’s consciousness of himself. This self-consciousness then elaborates itself again in history in the crude form until finally the absolute concept again comes to itself completely in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development apparent in nature and history – that is, the causal interconnection of the progressive movement from the lower to the higher, which asserts itself through all zigzag movements and temporary retrogression – is only a copy of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with. We again took a materialistic view of the thoughts in our heads, regarding them as images of real things instead of regarding real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thus, dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought – two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world, and thus the dialectic of Hegel was turned over; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. And this materialist dialectic, 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.
In this way, however, the revolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy was again taken up and at the same time freed from the idealist trimmings which with Hegel had prevented its consistent execution. The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidentally and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end – this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things. If, however, investigation always proceeds from this standpoint, the demand for final solutions and eternal truths ceases once for all; one is always conscious of the necessary limitation of all acquired knowledge, of the fact that it is conditioned by the circumstances in which it was acquired. On the other hand, one no longer permits oneself to be imposed upon by the antithesis, insuperable for the still common old metaphysics, between true and false, good and bad, identical and different, necessary and accidental. One knows that these antitheses have only a relative validity; that that which is recognised now as true has also its latent false side which will later manifest itself, just as that which is now regarded as false has also its true side by virtue of which it could previously be regarded as true. One knows that what is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer accidents, and that the so-called accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself – and so on.
The old method of investigation and thought which Hegel calls ‘metaphysical’, which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable, a method the relics of which still strongly haunt people’s minds, had a great deal of historical justification in its day. It was necessary first to examine things before it was possible to examine processes. One had first to know what a particular thing was before one could observe the changes it was undergoing. And such was the case with natural science. The old metaphysics, which accepted things as finished objects, arose from a natural science which investigated dead and living things as finished objects. But when this investigation had progressed so far that it became possible to take the decisive step forward, that is, to pass on the systematic investigation of the changes which these things undergo in nature itself, then the last hour of the old metaphysic struck in the realm of philosophy also. And in fact, while natural science up to the end of the last century was predominantly a collecting science, a science of finished things, in our century it is essentially a systematising science, a science of the processes, of the origin and development of these things and of the interconnection which binds all these natural processes into one great whole. Physiology, which investigates the processes occurring in plant and animal organisms; embryology, which deals with the development of individual organisms from germs to maturity; geology, which investigates the gradual formation of the Earth’s surface – all these are the offspring of our century.
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the recent history of Europe, and particularly at the end of the eighteenth century in France, which was the scene of the decisive battle against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism proved to be the only consistent philosophy, true to all the teachings of natural science, hostile to superstitions, cant, etc. The enemies of democracy tried, therefore, with all their energy, to ‘overthrow’, undermine and defame materialism, and defended various forms of philosophic idealism, which always leads, in one way or another, to the defence and support of religion.
Marx and Engels always defended philosophic materialism in the most determined manner, and repeatedly explained the profound error of every deviation from this basis. Their views are more dearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels – Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like The Communist Manifesto, are household books for every conscious worker.
However, Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eighteenth century but moved philosophy forward. He enriched it by the achievements of German classical philosophy especially by Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. Of these the main achievement is dialectics, i.e. the doctrine of development in its fuller, deeper form, free from one-sidedness – the doctrine, also, of the relativity of human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science – radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements – are a remarkable confirmation of the dialectical materialism of Marx, despite the doctrines of bourgeois philosophers with their ‘new’ returns to old and rotten idealism.
While deepening and developing philosophic materialism, Marx carried it to its conclusion; he extended its perception of nature to the perception of human society. The historical materialism of Marx represented the greatest conquest of scientific thought.
Chaos and arbitrariness, which reigned until then in the views on history and politics, were replaced by a strikingly consistent and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how out of one order of social life another and higher order develops, in consequence of the growth of the productive forces – how capitalism, for instance, grows out of serfdom.
Just as the cognition of man reflects nature (i.e. developing matter) which exists independently of him, so also the social cognition of man (i.e. the various views and doctrines-philosophic, religious, political, etc.) reflects the economic order of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of modern European states serve the purpose of strengthening the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
The philosophy of Marx completes in itself philosophic materialism which has provided humanity, and especially the working class, with a powerful instrument of knowledge.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1914-15
On the Question of Dialectics
1915
The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the ‘essentials’, one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter (Aristotle in his Metaphysics continually grapples with it and combats Heraclitus and Heraclitean ideas).
The correctness of this aspect of the content of dialectics must be tested by the history of science. This aspect of dialectics (e.g. in Plekhanov) usually receives inadequate attention: the identity of opposites is taken as the sum-total of examples (“for example, a seed”, “for example, primitive communism”. The same is true of Engels. But it is “in the interests of popularisation…”) and not as a law of cognition (and as a law of the objective world).
- In mathematics: + and –. Differential and integral.
- In mechanics: action and reaction.
- In physics: positive and negative electricity.
- In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms.
- In social science: the class struggle.
The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their ‘unity’ – although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here. In a certain sense both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society). The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement’, in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites. The two basic (or two possible? Or two historically observable?) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).
In the first conception of motion, self-movement, its driving force, its source, its motive, remains in the shade (or this source is made external – God, subject, etc.). In the second conception the chief attention is directed precisely to knowledge of the source of ‘self’-movement.
The first conception is lifeless, pale and dry. The second is living. The second alone furnishes the key to the ‘self-movement’ of everything existing; it alone furnishes the key to ‘leaps’, to the ‘break in continuity’, to the ‘transformation into the opposite’, to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.
The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.
(NB: The distinction between subjectivism (scepticism, sophistry, etc.) and dialectics, incidentally, is that in (objective) dialectics the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself relative. For objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative. For subjectivism and sophistry the relative is only relative and excludes the absolute.)
In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz. the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this ‘cell’ of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all contradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this society in the summation of its individual parts. From its beginning to its end.
Such must also be the method of exposition (or study) of dialectics in general (for with Marx the dialectics of bourgeois society is only a particular case of dialectics). To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with any proposition: the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man: Fido is a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognised): the individual is the universal. […] Consequently, the opposites (the individual is opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes) etc. Here already we have the elements, the germs, the concepts of necessity, of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence; for when we say: John is a man, Fido is a dog, this is a leaf of a tree, etc., we disregard a number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other.
Thus in any proposition we can (and must) disclose as in a ‘nucleus’ (‘cell’) the germs of all the elements of dialectics, and thereby show that dialectics is a property of all human knowledge in general.
And natural science shows us (and here again it must be demonstrated in any simple instance) objective nature with the same qualities, the transformation of the individual into the universal, of the contingent into the necessary, transitions, modulations, and the reciprocal connection of opposites. Dialectics is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism. This is the ‘aspect’ of the matter (it is not ‘an aspect’ but the essence of the matter) to which Plekhanov, not to speak of other Marxists, paid no attention.
* * *
Knowledge is represented in the form of a series of circles both by Hegel (see Logic) and by the modern ‘epistemologists’ of natural science, the eclectic and foe of Hegelianism (which he did not understand!), Paul Volkmann.
- ‘Circles’ in philosophy: (is a chronology of persons essential? No!)
- Ancient: from Democritus to Plato and the dialectics of Heraclitus.
- Renaissance: Descartes versus Gassendi (Spinoza?)
- Modern: Holbach—Hegel (via Berkeley, Hume, Kant).
- Hegel—Feuerbach—Marx
Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade) – here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with metaphysical materialism, the fundamental misfortune of which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie [theory of reflection], to the process and development of knowledge.
Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But philosophical idealism is (‘more correctly’ and ‘in addition’) a road to clerical obscurantism through one of the shades of the infinitely complex knowledge (dialectical) of man.
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness – voila the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscurantism (= philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.
* * *
Summary of Dialectics
Extract from Lenin’s ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s
Science of Logic’, 1914
- The determination of the concept out of itself (the thing itself must be considered in its relations and in its development);
- The contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon;
- The union of analysis and synthesis.
Such apparently are the elements of dialectics.
One could perhaps present these elements in greater detail as follows:
- The objectivity of consideration (not examples, not divergencies, but the Thing-in-itself).
- The entire totality of the manifold relations of this thing to others.
- The development of this thing, (phenomenon, respectively), its own movement, its own life.
- The internally contradictory tendencies (and sides) in this thing.
- The thing (phenomenon, etc.) as the sum and unity of opposites.
- The struggle, respectively unfolding, of these opposites, contradictory strivings, etc.
- The union of analysis and synthesis – the breakdown of the separate parts and the totality, the summation of these parts.
- The relations of each thing (phenomenon, etc.) are not only manifold, but general, universal. Each thing (phenomenon, etc.) is connected with every other.
- Not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other (into its opposite?).
- The endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations, etc.
- The endless process of the deepening of man’s knowledge of the thing, of phenomena, processes, etc., from appearance to essence and from less profound to more profound essence.
- From co-existence to causality and from one form of connection and reciprocal dependence to another, deeper, more general form.
- The repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties, etc., of the lower and
- The apparent return to the old (negation of the negation).
- The struggle of content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content.
- The transition of quantity into quality and vice versa (15 and 16 are examples of 9).
In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics, but it requires explanations and development.
- Why does the working class need a philosophy?
- What is ‘common sense’?
- What is materialism?
- What is idealism?
- How do we explain the rise of materialism from the seventeenth century onwards? What were the limitations of this materialism?
- Can you summarise Hegel’s ideas, including the strong points and limitations?
- How did Marx and Engels rescue dialectics?
- How would you define dialectics?
- How would you define empiricism? What are the strengths and limitations of this approach?
- What is formal logic? Can you give an example of someone approaching a question formalistically?
- What are the positive and negative sides to formal logic?
- What is the relationship between formal and dialectical logic?
- Can you explain the law of the development of quantity into quality (and vice versa)? Can you give some examples that demonstrate this?
- Can you explain what is meant by the “interpenetration of opposites”? Can you give some examples that demonstrate this?
- What is the relationship between true and false?
- Can you explain what is meant by the “negation of the negation”? Can you give some examples that demonstrate this?
- Was the First World War caused by the assassination of a Crown Prince in Sarajevo? What is the role of accident in history?
- What is the difference between determinism and fatalism? Into which of these categories would you place Marxism?
- Using what you have learned, are you able to explain why workers sometimes accept major attacks on their working conditions, then strike over some ‘small’ incident?
- Can you explain how having a dialectical materialist understanding is a vital tool to help the working class achieve victory in the class struggle?
* * *
Level 1
‘The ABC of Materialist Dialectics’, Leon Trotsky
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels
Anti-Dühring, Part One, Friedrich Engels
The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective, Alan Woods
‘Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital’, Karl Marx
The Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov
Level 2
Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science, Ted Grant and Alan Woods
‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels
Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
‘In Defence of Hegel’, Hamid Alizadeh
Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, Mark Buchanan
Level 3
The Philosophical Notebooks of VI Lenin
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Part One (also known as The Shorter Logic), GWF Hegel
Introduction to Phenomenology of the Mind, GWF Hegel
Endnotes
[1] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 59.
[2] Marx, ‘Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital’, MECW, Vol. 35, p. 19.
[3] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, Vol. 29, p. 263.
[4] Lenin, Materialism and Empiro-criticism, LCW, Vol. 8, p. 55.
[5] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW, Vol. 5,pp. 36-7.
[6] Engels, ‘Introduction to the English Edition (1892) of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, MECW, Vol. 27, p. 283.
[7*] Editor’s note: In the seventeenth century, Galileo demonstrated the truth of Copernicus’ theory that the earth and planets revolved around the Sun. The professors of the day ridiculed these ideas and used the power of the Index and the Inquisition against Galileo to force him to recant his views. – AW & RS
[8] Ibid., p. 290.
[9] Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, MECW, Vol. 4, p. 129.
[10] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, MECW, Vol. 24, p. 286.
[11] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, MECW, Vol. 26, p. 370.
[12] Ibid., p. 382.
[13] Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW, Vol. 25, p. 131.
[14] Plato, Cratylus, 402a.
[15] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, MECW, Vol. 26, p. 384, emphasis in original.
[16] Ibid., p. 360.
[17] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, MECW, Vol. 24, pp. 299-300.
[18] Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 68.
[19] Ibid., pp. 68-70.
[20] Lenin, Karl Marx, LCW, Vol. 21, p. 45.
[21] Ibid., p. 53.
[22] Ibid. pp. 54-5.
[23] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, MECW, Vol. 24, p. 302.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW, Vol. 25, p. 43.
[26] Ibid., p. 61.
[27] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, MECW, Vol. 24, pp. 300-1.
[28] Lenin, ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic’, LCW, Vol. 38, p. 97.
[29] Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW, Vol. 25, p. 112.
[30] Ibid., p. 131.
[31] Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 2-3.
[32] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW, Vol. 29, p. 263.
[33] Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 426, emphasis in original.
[34] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 5.
[35] Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW, Vol. 25, p. 270.