DIALECTICS

WHAT IS DIALECTICS?

Introduction

DIALECTICS is derived from the Greek word “dialego” which means to discourse or debate.
Many of the the old Greek philosophers were dialecticians like, Aristotle and Plato. Heraclitus formulated masterpieces of dialectic. (1)
Plato used the “dialectical method” in his dialogues, whereas Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic intellect among these philosophers, investigated the most essential forms of dialectical thought. (2)

In ancient times dialectics was the art of arriving at the truth by exposing the contradictions in arguments of opponents and overcoming these contradictions. They thought that the clash of opinions was the best method of eventually getting to the truth. Since those times dialectics has been applied to nature, natural science and social science to analyse and divulge the contradictions within them.
Since ancient times there have been brilliant exponents of dialectics such as Descartes and Spinoza and masterpieces of dialectic were produced by French philosophers such as Diderot and Rousseau. Rousseau produced his Discourse on the origin of inequality among men.

To apply dialectics to nature, science has to be at a definite level, which the ancient Greeks were not in a position to do. Gathering material and facts arranging them into definite order, and so on, has to be carried out. The beginnings of the exact natural sciences were worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period (derived from the Egyptian port of Alexandria) dating from 300 B.C. This period witnessed the rapid advance of mathematics and mechanics (Euclid and Archimedes) and also astronomy, anatomy, physiology, geography and other sciences. Later on the natural sciences developed further by the Middle Ages and by the Arabs.
It is probably important here to mention the name of Darwin, in the 19th century, whose important works gave the greatest impetus to the development of natural history. He proved that the organic world of plants and animals (including man) is the product of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. These earth-shattering developments enabled the updating and greater appreciation of the dialectical method.

The universe, its evolution, the development of mankind and its understanding only are obtained using the dialectical method. Regarding actions and reactions of becoming and ceasing to be, of progressive or retrogressive changes, the spirit of what was known as, “Modern German Philosophy”, set to work.
Kant began his career by resolving the stable solar system of Newton. He drew the conclusion that, given the origin of the solar system, its future death followed of necessity.
The new German philosophy terminated in the Hegelian system. Here the whole world, natural, historical and intellectual is for the first time shown to be a process in constant motion, change, transformation and development. Hegel tried to show the internal interconnections in this motion and development.

The fullest development of dialectics is when it is put together with the materialist philosophy, which brings this method of examination of the world in line with complete reality.
The world outlook of Dialectical and Historical Materialism is usually associated with the names of Marx and Engels.
Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of Dialectical Materialism to the study of social life, society and its history.
Marx and Engels took only the rational kernel casting aside its idealistic shell and developed it further to lend it a modern scientific form. This method of dialectics was opposite and different from that of Hegel because of his process of thinking that the Idea is the creator of the real world. With Marx and Engels the ideal was nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.
It was Feuerbach who was the philosopher who hade been the one to restore materialism to its rights, but it was Marx and Engels who developed the essential parts of this philosophy into a scientific-philosophical theory of materialism and cast aside the integrated outlook of Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

THE PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF THE DIALECTICAL METHOD.

The Principal features are:

(a) The integration of things
(b) Negation of Negation (or their coming into being and their passing away
(c) Quantity and Quality
(d) The internal contradiction within things.

The integration of all things

Dialectics does not regard nature as an accidental mixture of things, unconnected and in isolation. On the contrary it regards things as being connected and part of an integral whole.
Everything, every phenomenon is and all phenomena are, organically connected with, dependent on and determined by each other.
So, therefore, you cannot understand what is going on in nature if you take things by themselves and isolate them from their surroundings.

Negation of Negation (or the coming into being of things and their passing away)

Nature is not at rest; it is not immobile and does not stagnate. There is always movement and change, continuous renewal and development. Something is always arising and developing something is always disintegrating and dying away. (3)

Quantity into Quality

Dialectics does not regard the process of development as a simple process of growth, but as a development, which passes from insignificant and imperceptible changes in quantity to open fundamental changes in quality. These qualitative changes are not gradual but rapid and abrupt taking the form of a leap from one state to another.
So things do not move in a circle, a simple repletion of what has already happened. With negation of negation and quantity into quality things go onward and upward, a new transition from the old qualitative state to the new qualitative state, development from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.

Describing the transition from quantitative changes to qualitative changes in natural science, Engels says:

“ In Physics… every change is a passing quantity into quality, as a result of a quantitative change of some form of movement either inherent in a body or imparted to it. For example, the temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state, but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, a moment arrives when this state of cohesion changes and the water is converted in one case into steam and the other into ice…A definite minimum current is required to make a platinum wire glow; every metal has its melting and boiling point at a given pressure…Finally every gas has its critical point at which, by proper pressure and cooling, it can be converted into a liquid state … What are known as the constants of physics (the point at which on state passes into another) are in most cases nothing but designations for the nodal points at which a quantitative (change) increase or decrease of movement causes a qualitative change in the state of the given body and at which, consequently, quantity is transformed into quality.

Passing to Chemistry, Engels continues:

“Chemistry may be called the science of the qualitative changes, which take place in bodies as the effect of changes of quantitative composition…Take Oxygen: if the molecule contains three atoms instead of the customary two, we get ozone, a body definitely distinct in odour and reaction from ordinary oxygen. And what shall we say of the different proportions in which oxygen combines with nitrogen or sulphur and each of which produces a body qualitatively different from all other bodies!”

The internal contradiction within things

There are internal contradictions in everything in nature. Everything has its negative and positive side, a past and future, something dying away and something developing and the struggle between these opposites, the struggle between the old and the new, that which is dying and that which is being born, the disappearing and developing, constitutes the internal content of the process of development, the internal content of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes.
In physics you have the contradiction between +ve and –ve in electricity. In chemistry you have association and disassociation with elements.

Postscript

The motion of matter is dialectical. The integration of negation of negation with quantity into quality and the conflict of opposites can be seen in the thesis – antithesis – synthesis process. In Hegelian philosophy the thesis is the proposition forming the first stage of the dialectical process. The antithesis is the direct opposite in contrast to the thesis. The synthesis is the final stage in the Hegelian dialectical process that resolves the contradiction between the thesis and antithesis. The synthesis is a higher order and new quality, which may negate aspects of the previous parts.

(1) The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites

Heraclitus held that (1) everything is constantly changing and (2) opposite things are identical, so that (3) everything is and is not at the same time. Plato indicates the source of the flux doctrine: “Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and comparing existents to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river” (Plato. Cratylus 402a)

(2) “Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is
set over them; no other science can be placed higher”. [Plato. The Republic.
Book V11]
(3) The process of natural selection by Darwin ascertains that different living
organisms develop from earlier forms by natural selection.