For formal thinking, light must be either a wave or a particle but the truth turned out to be dialectical – light is both wave and particle.
For ordinary understanding there is no difference between the appearance of a thing and its essence, but for dialectics the form and content of something can be quite contradictory – parliamentary democracy being the prime example: democracy in form, but dictatorship in content!Īnd for dialectics, things can be contradictory not just in appearance, but in essence. For example formal thought would explain: ‘a fish is something with no legs which lives in the water’.ĭarwin however, considered fish dialectically: some of the animals living in the water were not fish, and some of the fish had legs, but it was the genesis of all the animals as part of a whole interconnected process which explained the nature of a fish: they came from something and are evolving into something else.ĭarwin went behind the appearance of fish to get to their essence. See also: dialectics, materialism, Historical Materialism and Political Economy.ĭialectics is the method of reasoning which aims to understand things concretely in all their movement, change and interconnection, with their opposite and contradictory sides in unity.ĭialectics is opposed to the formal, metaphysical mode of thought of ordinary understanding which begins with a fixed definition of a thing according to its various attributes. 'Dialectical Materialism' was coined by Karl Kautsky and popularised in the Second International after the death of Marx and Engels. Of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher."Īn example of dialectical materialism applied is the materialist conception of history. The transitory character of everything and in everything nothing can endureīefore it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, "For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. With each epoch-making discovery even in the sphere of natural science, materialism has to change its form and after history was also subjected to materialistic treatment, a new avenue of development has opened here, too. "Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics (dialectical thought), is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature."īut dialectical materialism insists on the approximate relative character of every scientific theory of the structure of matter and its properties it insists on the absence of absolute boundaries in nature, on the transformation of moving matter from one state into another, that from our point of view apparently irreconcilable with it, and so forth. heat), while the other gains a corresponding quantity of motion of another quality (mechanical motion, electricity, chemical decomposition). "Change of form of motion is always a process that takes place between at least two bodies, of which one loses a definite quantity of motion of one quality (e.g. There been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there "Motion is the mode of existence of matter.
A cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. "It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation. The materialist dialectic is the theoretical foundation of Marxism (while being communist is the practice of Marxism). Simply stated, this methodology is the combination of Dialectics and Materialism. Dialectical Materialism is a way of understanding reality whether thoughts, emotions, or the material world.
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