Dialectical philosophy became popular with Plato’s “Socratic dialogues”. The dialectical method is simply a set of rules applied together to more clearly understand our interdependent real world.
“The dialectic is nothing more than the science of the general laws of movement and development of nature, human society and thought.” (English)
Hegel gathered within his idealist philosophy the three laws of dialectic:
- The law of the unity and conflict of opposites (Heraclitus);
- The law of the passage of quantitative changes to qualitative changes (Aristotle);
- The law of the negation of the negation (Hegel).
The point here is that humanity used the dialectical method to investigate the surrounding world since 3000 years ago.
The unity and conflict of opposites.
The law of contradiction in things is the basic law of the materialist dialectic.
The world we live in is a unity of contradictions or a unity of opposites: cold-heat, light-dark, Capital-Labor, birth-death, wealth-poverty, positive-negative, boom-depression, being-thinking, finite. -infinity, repulsion-attraction, left-right, up-down, evolution-revolution, chance-need, sell-buy, etc.
To understand something, its essence, it is necessary to look for internal contradictions. Under certain circumstances, the universal is the individual and the individual is the universal. That things become their opposites – cause can become effect and effect can become cause – it is because they are mere links in the endless chain in the development of matter.
Another example to illustrate the universality of the contradiction:
- 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 sciences: the class struggle.
- In war: attack and defense, advance and retreat, victory and defeat. (Mao Zedong)
- inhuman; inner divine spark and material body (visit Gnosticism on my site)
- In Eastern philosophy: Yin and Yang aspects.
Quantitative changes into qualitative changes
This is the cornerstone of understanding change. Change or evolution does not take place gradually in a straight and smooth line. There are long periods of evolution in which no apparent change occurs, and suddenly a new form or forms of life emerge. Development is characterized by breaks in continuity, leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions.
The denial of the denial
The whole process can best be represented as a spiral, where the movement returns to the position it started in, but at a higher level. In other words, historical progress is achieved through a series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negative, this does not represent its total elimination. It does not completely delete the stage it supplants.
Engels explains a whole series of examples to illustrate the negation of the negation: “Let us take a grain of barley. Millions of such grains of barley are ground, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley complies with the conditions that are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then, under the influence of heat and humidity, a specific change occurs, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, is negated, and in its place appears the plant that has arisen from it, the negation of the grain.
But what is the normal life process of this plant? It grows, blossoms, fertilizes itself, and finally produces barley grains once more, and, as soon as these have ripened, the stalk dies, is itself negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have the original barley grain again, but not as a single unit, but ten, twenty or thirty times.
An understanding of dialectical philosophy is an essential prerequisite for understanding the doctrine of contradictions. See my next article on social contradictions.
