II

Wellred

Core Argument

Chapter II: Dialectics and the Negation of the Negation

Engels opens this chapter by reaffirming the enduring relevance of Anti-Dühring in his 1885 preface. Though Dühring's system has long been forgotten, the polemic forced a positive exposition of the dialectical method and the communist world outlook first presented in The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto. The dialectical laws of motion, Engels insists, operate in nature, history, and thought. Hegel first developed them mystically, but Marx and Engels stripped this idealist form away. These laws must be discovered in nature, not built into it; the advance of theoretical natural science itself is forcing dialectics upon empiricists as old rigid antagonisms dissolve.

Engels demonstrates that contradiction is objectively present in things and processes. Motion itself is a contradiction—a body is simultaneously in one place and not in it. Life is likewise a contradiction, a being constantly itself and yet something else. Higher mathematics operates with contradictions—straight lines equalling curves, the square root of minus one—yet obtains correct results. Dühring's assertion that contradiction is absurdity is refuted by the fact that motion, life, and mathematics all contain real contradictions.

Dühring systematically misrepresents Marx's dialectical method, claiming it relies on Hegelian "negation of the negation" and "quantity into quality" as mere verbal jugglery. Engels shows Dühring quotes Marx incorrectly, inverting his actual argument. Marx states that a definite minimum sum of value is required for transformation into capital, citing Hegel's law as confirmation, not as proof. Similarly, Marx's description of reestablished individual property on the basis of social ownership of land and means of production is clear: social ownership of the means of production, individual ownership of consumer goods. Dühring's "property at once both individual and social" is his own fabrication.

The negation of the negation, Engels argues, is an extremely general law of development operating in nature, history, and thought. It is not a proof-producing instrument like formal logic, but a method for advancing from the known to the unknown. Stating that a process is a negation of the negation says nothing about its particular features; it merely brings it under this one law of motion. Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no or destroying something arbitrarily. As Spinoza said, every determination is a negation. The kind of negation is determined by the general and particular nature of the process—grinding a grain of barley makes the second negation impossible. Men thought dialectically long before they knew the term; the law operates unconsciously in nature and history and was first clearly formulated by Hegel.