Dialectics

In antiquity certain philosophers understood dialectics to mean the art of gaining truth by means of revealing contradictions in the arguments of an opponent and then overcoming the contradictions. Later on, dialectics came to signify the study of basic changes, interconnections, evolution. Dialectics looks upon all phenomena as constantly moving and changing, and considers the evolution of nature a result of the conflict of opposites taking place in all things. Many ancient Greek philosophers were, to use the expression of Engels, natural-born dialecticians. Heraclitus taught that things both exist and do not exist during the same instant, since any given thing is in a continuous process of change. However, in Greek philosophy, dialectics appeared in a simple, primitive, and naive form. It could not demonstrate in detail the universal connection of all phenomena. In subsequent centuries, the metaphysical (essentially static) conception of the universe, as opposed to the dialectical, became predominant. Certain aspects of dialectics appeared in the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza, but on the whole the outlook of both these philosophers was metaphysical. Only in the second half of the eighteenth century did the metaphysical world view begin to show signs of giving way. The first breach was made by Kant with his theory of the evolution of the solar system. Modern philosophy reached a culminating point in Hegel. “Its greatest merit was the re-adoption of dialectics as the highest form of thinking.” (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 26) Hegelian dialectics was the first philosophical method to conceive the whole world of nature, society, and thought as a process, as in continuous motion, change, evolution. The internal contradictions of the process constitute the basis of its self-movement, its self-development. Hegel, however, interpreted the dialectical method in a completely idealistic fashion. Dialectics became scientific only when Marx and Engels freed it from its idealistic Hegelian encumbrances and developed it further as a doctrine of evolution naturalistically conceived, thereby creating dialectical materialism. Dialectics, as expounded by Marx and Engels and developed further by Lenin is a science of the basic laws of evolution of nature, human society, and thought.