Dialectics

Where does the word "dialectics" come from?

The Greek dialektikē comes from a verb meaning "to converse". As in Plato's Socratic dialogues, dialectic was the art by which people holding different views approach the truth together through argument and counter-argument. A thesis is met by an antithesis that limits or corrects it, and at best a synthesis of both views results; this is the root of the familiar "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" scheme.

In modern times Kant treated under the name of "dialectic" the insoluble contradictions (antinomies) into which reason falls when it tries to go beyond the limits of experience. Fichte turned this into a positive method, holding that reality is constituted in three steps: the "I" posits itself (thesis), is opposed by a "not-I" (antithesis), and the tension is resolved in a synthesis.

What was new in Hegel's dialectics?

Hegel turned dialectics from an art of conversation into the principle by which concepts and the world itself move. For him contradiction is not an error of thought but the root of all movement and life. Every concept or form of being, when examined, proves one-sided and passes over into its opposite, and the resolution of the contradiction yields a higher stage that contains the earlier ones. Hegel called this process Aufhebung (sublation), a German word that means at once to cancel, to preserve and to lift up. He regarded the ancient Heraclitus, who saw all things in a strife of opposites, as an early dialectician in his own sense.

In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Hegel illustrated this with a plant: "The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way the fruit declares the blossom a false form of the plant's existence, and the fruit steps into its place as its truth." These forms supplant one another, yet "their fluid nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity", and the life of the whole consists in each being as necessary as the others.

Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte sagen, daß Jene von dieser widerlegt wird; ebenso wird durch die Frucht die Blüte für ein falsches Dasein der Pflanze erklärt, und als ihre Wahrheit tritt jene an die Stelle von dieser.

One misconception needs correcting. "Thesis–antithesis–synthesis" spread widely as the formula of Hegel's dialectics, and critics such as Karl Popper presented it that way, but Hegel himself rarely used these terms. In the preface to the Phenomenology he warned instead that applying the triadic form revived by Kant in a formal way reduces it to "a lifeless schema" and scientific organisation to "a table".

durch den wir sie zum leblosen Schema, zu einem eigentlichen Schemen, und die wissenschaftliche Organisation zur Tabelle herabgebracht sehen

What did Marx "turn upside down"?

In the afterword to the second edition of Capital, dated January 1873, Marx set his method against Hegel's: "My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian but its direct opposite." For Hegel the process of thinking, which under the name of the Idea he even turns into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, which is only its outward appearance; "with me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing other than the material world transposed and translated in the human head."

Meine dialektische Methode ist der Grundlage nach von der Hegelschen nicht nur verschieden, sondern ihr direktes Gegenteil.

Yet Marx did not discard Hegel. When educated Germany was treating Hegel as a "dead dog", he openly avowed himself "the pupil of that mighty thinker": the mystification dialectics suffered in Hegel's hands did not prevent Hegel from being the first to present its general forms of movement in a comprehensive and conscious way. Then comes the famous sentence: "With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

Sie steht bei ihm auf dem Kopf. Man muß sie umstülpen, um den rationellen Kern in der mystischen Hülle zu entdecken.

In its mystified form dialectics became the fashion in Germany because it seemed to glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal to the bourgeoisie, because in understanding what exists it also understands its negation, its necessary downfall, "regards every form that has come into being as in fluid movement, and therefore in its transient aspect as well, lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary". Engels summed up the same idea as seeing the world "not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes".

Capital is where Marx put this method to work. Starting from the commodity, the "cell form" of capitalist society, he uncovered its internal contradiction between use-value and exchange-value and traced how that contradiction unfolds through successive forms: money, capital, surplus value.

What are Engels's "three laws of dialectics"?

Engels held that the laws of dialectics can be abstracted from the history of nature and of human society, and in the unfinished manuscript Dialectics of Nature he reduced them to three:

• the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
• the law of the interpenetration of opposites;
• the law of the negation of the negation.

das Gesetz des Umschlagens von Quantität in Qualität und umgekehrt;

das Gesetz von der Durchdringung der Gegensätze;

das Gesetz von der Negation der Negation.

All three, according to Engels, had already been developed by Hegel in his Logic in idealist fashion, as mere laws of thought. Hegel's mistake "lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them". Engels's extension of dialectics to nature set off the long "Engels debate": critics hold that he turned Marx's historical method into a rigid metaphysical system, defenders see a consistent extension of the materialist outlook the two men shared.

How do dialectics and dialectical materialism differ?

Dialectics is the name of a method and concept used differently by many philosophies, from the ancient art of conversation through Hegel and Marx to the Frankfurt School of the twentieth century. Dialectical materialism names one of them: the Marxist philosophy in which Marx and Engels critically combined Hegel's dialectics with Feuerbach's materialism, a name that Plekhanov established after Marx's death. Its institutionalisation in the Soviet Union as "diamat", and the omission of the negation of the negation from Stalin's 1938 formulation, are treated under Dialectical Materialism.

In 1913 Lenin defined dialectics as "the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and least one-sided form" and "the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, which gives us a reflection of eternally developing matter". This dictionary treats dialectics on its own because the history of this method's passage from Hegel to Marx is itself a key to the genealogy of Marxism.

учение об относительности человеческого знания, дающего нам отражение вечно развивающейся материи