Dialectics

Conception of reality as a dynamic and complex system of densely interrelated parts.

Dialectics vs Metaphysics

The dialectical conception of reality is present from Heraclitus and the Epicureans (Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura") to Spinoza among the materialist thinkers, and from Aristotle to Hegel among the idealists.

Modern philosophy, on the other hand, although it too had brilliant representatives of dialectics (for example, Descartes and Spinoza), had increasingly crystallized, through English influence, into the so-called metaphysical way of thinking, which also dominated almost exclusively the French of the eighteenth century, at least in their specifically philosophical works. [...]

For the metaphysician, things and their mental images, concepts, are objects of investigation given once and for all, isolated, to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, firm, fixed and rigid. The metaphysician thinks in crude, unmediated antitheses: his language is yea, yea, and nay, nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

For him, a thing either exists or does not exist: a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect likewise stand in rigid antithesis to one another. At first sight this way of thinking seems very plausible to us, because it is that of so-called sound common sense.

But sound common sense, however respectable a companion it may be in the homely realm of its own four walls, has very wonderful adventures as soon as it ventures out into the wide world of research; and the metaphysical way of thinking, although justified and even necessary in those wide territories, whose extent varies according to the nature of the object, sooner or later always comes up against a barrier beyond which it becomes one-sided, limited, abstract, and loses itself in insoluble contradictions, because, attending to things, it loses sight of their connection; attending to their being, it loses sight of their coming into being and passing away; attending to their rest, it forgets their movement: because it cannot see the wood for the trees. [...]

[And then] we discover that cause and effect are representations which hold good as such only in their application to each particular case, but which merge as soon as we consider the particular case in its general connection with the world as a whole, and dissolve in the conception of universal change, in which causes and effects are constantly changing places, so that what is effect here or now is cause there or then, and vice versa.

None of these facts and methods of thought fit into the framework of metaphysical thinking. For dialectics, on the other hand, which grasps things and their conceptual reflections essentially in their connection, their concatenation, their movement, their origin and their passing away, facts such as those mentioned are so many confirmations of its own method. [...]

Dialectics, on the other hand, grasps things and their conceptual reflections essentially in their connection, their concatenation, their movement, their origin and their passing away. [...] Only by the dialectical method, therefore, with constant attention to the general interaction of coming into being and passing away, of progressive and regressive changes, can an exact representation of the universe, of its evolution and of the evolution of mankind be obtained, as well as of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men.

"Anti-Dühring". Frederick Engels 1878

Dialectics in Marxist critique

Dialectics appears in Marxist thought as a set of implicit conceptions about reality. Among them:

• Reality, any reality, forms a single whole in continuous transformation.
• The totality determines and gives meaning to its parts; the mere sum or aggregation of the parts does not allow a coherent description of the whole; if it cannot be integrated into a global framework of knowledge about the whole, it will become mere casuistry, knowledge alienated from its own object.
• The categories commonly used to explain change in empiricism, such as cause and effect, the distinction between the genitive (that which gives origin) and the substantive (that which is produced by it), quantity and quality, the antagonistic character of opposites... are in reality arbitrary, the product of a fragmenting and alienating gaze. Causes and effects intertwine and merge in the total vision (what is determinant is the whole, not linear causal chains); the accumulation of quantitative changes produces nothing other than qualitative changes; etc. etc.
• The compartmentalization of knowledge into different sciences, disciplines, fields, etc. does not correspond to the structure of reality but to the limitations of empiricism and the metaphysics that accompanies it. They are one more result of ideology.