Basic dialectical laws

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The basic dialectical laws or main laws of dialectic were conceived by Friedrich Engels in Anti-Dühring and in Dialectic of Nature as the main features of the natural philosophy of dialectical materialism . This is a program of a reinterpretation of Hegel's dialectics , carried out on the basis of materialism (see also dialectics in Marx and Engels ).

Dialectics as a science of the overall context

Engels wanted to convince himself

“That in nature the same dialectical laws of motion prevail in the tangle of innumerable changes that dominate the apparent randomness of events in history; the same laws which, also forming the thread running through the history of the development of human thought, gradually come to the mind of thinking people; which was first developed by Hegel in a comprehensive way, but in a mystified form, and which to peel out of this mystical form and to bring it to consciousness in all its simplicity and general validity. "

In contrast to Hegel's objective idealism , for materialistic dialectics the unity of the world consists in its materiality.

Movement is the mode of existence of matter.

Against metaphysically narrow thinking

Engels considers the approach of the old natural philosophy to be as unscientific as the ideas of the utopian socialists in the field of social theory . He defends their bold anticipations against the fact that they were polemically put down, just as he rejects the "St. Vitus Dance" that authors like Eugen Dühring organized when the name Hegel was mentioned. In doing so, Dühring often makes use of undigested Hegelian ideas, just as many natural scientists are all too often unable to free themselves from outdated metaphysical habits of thought.

Like Hegel before, Engels opposes a “metaphysical” approach that gets stuck in conceptual differences that are dogmatically taken for absolute (e.g. between “statics” and “dynamics”) and believes that it has found absolute truths.

“For the metaphysician, things and their thought images, the concepts, are isolated, one after the other and without the other to be considered, solid, rigid objects of investigation given once and for all. He thinks in nothing but unmediated opposites; His speech is yes, yes, no, no, what is about it is evil. For him a thing either exists or it does not exist: a thing cannot be itself and another at the same time. Positive and negative are absolutely mutually exclusive; Cause and effect are also in stark contrast to one another. At first glance, this way of thinking seems extremely plausible to us because it is that of so-called common sense. Common sense alone, no matter how respectable a fellow he is in the home-baked area of ​​his four walls, experiences wonderful adventures as soon as he ventures into the wide world of research; And the metaphysical way of looking at things, in such broad areas, depending on the nature of the object, is justified and even necessary, sooner or later comes up against a limit beyond which it becomes one-sided, narrow-minded, abstract and ends up in insoluble contradictions lost because over the individual things she forgets their connection, over their being their becoming and passing away, over their calmness their movement, because they cannot see the forest for the trees. "

The epistemological status of the basic laws

The intention is

"To prove that the dialectical laws are real laws of development of nature, therefore also valid for theoretical natural research."

However, it shows misunderstanding to logically derive, prove, or predict individual laws of nature from the dialectical fundamental laws.

The dialectical basic laws can be understood as statements of principles that theoretically establish the connection between individual statements of law and thereby fulfill the heuristic function of grasping connections more clearly and universally and rediscovering them in areas previously unknown.

The materialistic dialectic thus contradicts both a priorism , which promises to derive all knowledge, including empirical knowledge, from ultimate axioms ; as well as absolutized empiricism , which is fundamentally opposed to epistemological hierarchy formation such as perception - laws - principles - philosophical knowledge.

The transition to something new from one level to another corresponds to a “leap” in the cognitive process, which however does not have to remain completely irrational or inexplicable, but can be understood through dialectical thinking.

The basic dialectical laws

Struggle and unity of opposites

Among the laws of dialectic, the law of unity and the struggle of opposites is called the most important. It answers the question of the source, of the driving forces of movement, change and development. The unity and the struggle of opposites together constitute the essence of the dialectical contradiction.

Turning quantity into quality

After that, at a certain point in development, purely quantitative changes lead to a change in quality.

“For our purpose we can express this in such a way that in nature, in a way that is precisely established for each individual case, qualitative changes can only take place through the quantitative addition or quantitative withdrawal of matter or movement (so-called energy). All qualitative differences in nature are based either on different chemical compositions or on different amounts or. Forms of movement (energy) or, which is almost always the case, both. So it is impossible without supply resp. Removal of matter or movement, d. H. without changing the quantity of the body in question, changing its quality. "

According to Engels, the change in form of movement is a process between at least two bodies in which the quality changes and the quantity remains the same:

“Change of form of movement is always a process that takes place between at least two bodies, one of which loses a certain amount of movement of this quality (e.g. heat), the other a corresponding amount of movement of that quality (mechanical movement, electricity, chemical Decomposition). Quantity and quality correspond here on both sides and to one another. "

This dialectical basic law is countered by the thesis " Nature does not make leaps ", which Engels dialectizes:

"These middle links only prove that there is no crack in nature, precisely because nature is made up of jumps."

(Today such an envelope is often called emergence .)

Negation of negation

The law of negation of negation is a general basic law of materialistic dialectics. It goes back to Hegel, who formulated it as a law of development of the absolute idea. Dialectical materialism emphasizes the objective character of this law. According to this law, development is the emergence of new qualities from old qualities, in such a way that the disappearance of the old quality (simple negation) is connected with its "finding" (double negation) in the new quality. Dialectical negation is different from logical negation.

criticism

The following important information is missing from this article or section:
This is just a very specific, anti-Marxist and anti-Hegelian criticism, and not the only criticism.
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Critics consider the "laws of nature" in the Hegelian form to be a purely sophistic play on terms and words, in the materialistic form of Engels it is a triviality. It has long been known that the “quantitative” addition of heat from liquid water produces gaseous water vapor; But to explain this with the “change from quantity to quality” is a purely arbitrary term that rather conceals the real physical and chemical processes (see thermodynamics ) and thus hinders a deeper understanding of the processes.

The laws of the penetration of opposites and the negation of negation are primarily there to undermine elementary laws of logic . This in no way explains how the negation of a thing can include it at the same time, but this is only postulated in order to then be able to say that progress has taken place. The fact that one can somehow argue that opposites are dependent on one another is not denied; but if it is true, be it a triviality (where there is no opposing, one cannot speak of an opposing either) and does not bring any deeper knowledge gain.

Contradictions can be taken as the starting point of a methodology of knowledge advancement. To do this, however, one must blame the logical contradictions on human knowledge and not on reality itself.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Marx and I were probably the only ones who had saved conscious dialectics from German idealistic philosophy into the materialistic conception of nature and history." [Engels: Herr Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, p. 12f. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 7643f (cf. MEW Vol. 20, p. 10f)]
  2. ↑ Engels: Mr. Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, p. 14. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 7645 (cf. MEW Vol. 20, pp. 11-12)
  3. ↑ "The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proven not by a few sleight of hand, but by a long and drawn-out development of philosophy and natural science." [Engels: Herr Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, p. 70. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 7701 (cf. MEW Vol. 20, p. 41)]
  4. ^ "After on the one hand the reaction against" natural philosophy ", largely justified by this wrong starting point and the helpless boggy of the Berlin Hegelian, had its free run and degenerated into mere ranting, on the other hand, after natural science in its theoretical needs from the popular eclectic metaphysics so Having been brilliantly left in the lurch, it will probably be possible to pronounce the name Hegel in front of naturalists once again without evoking that Vitus dance in which Herr Dühring does so wonderfully. ”[Engels: Dialektik der Natur, p. 48. Digital library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 8367 (cf. MEW Vol. 20, p. 334)]
  5. ↑ Engels: The development of socialism from utopia to science, p. 34f. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 8268f (cf. MEW Vol. 19, pp. 203-204)
  6. ↑ Engels: Dialectics of Nature. P. 74.Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 8393 (see MEW Vol. 20, p. 349)
  7. ↑ “By designating the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not think of trying to prove that it is historically necessary. (...) There is a total lack of insight into the nature of dialectics when Herr Dühring regards it as an instrument of mere proof, as formal logic or elementary mathematics, for example, can be understood in a limited way. Even formal logic is above all a method for finding new results, for advancing from the known to the unknown, and the same thing, only in a far more eminent sense, is dialectic, which, because it breaks through the narrow horizon of formal logic, is the germ of a more comprehensive one Weltanschauung contains. ”[Engels: Mr. Eugen Dühring's upheaval in science. P. 242 f. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 7873 f. (see MEW vol. 20, p. 125 f.)]
  8. ↑ “The principles are not the same as the laws that are statements about certain concrete phenomena. They are not laws themselves; they are rules according to which laws are to be searched for and by which these are to be found. This heuristic point of view is decisive for all principles. They proceed from the assumption of certain common provisions that are valid for all natural occurrences, and they ask whether something can be found in the individual areas that corresponds to these provisions and how it is to be specifically defined. ”(Cassirer, ECW 19, p 65.)
  9. ↑ Engels: Dialektik der Natur, pp. 74f. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 8393f (see MEW Vol. 20, p. 349f)
  10. ↑ Engels: Dialektik der Natur, pp. 75f. Digital Library Volume 11: Marx / Engels, p. 8394f (see MEW Vol. 20, p. 349f)
  11. ↑ MEW Vol. 20, p. 533.
  12. ↑ Hans Albert: Critique of the pure epistemology. Mohr: Tübingen 1987. ISBN 3-16-945229-0 , p. 97