Dialectics and Its Historical Forms

Lecture 9

OUTLINE THEORY OF DIALECTICS

The aim of the theme is: to learn the main principles of dialectics as the theory of development through explication of the concept of dialectics; its historical forms and principles, what laws of dialectics lie in and what categories of dialectics are to define their worldview and methodological functions.

The key words of the theme are: contradiction, development, dialectics, principle, law, category, system.

Dialectics and Its Historical Forms

At the previous lectures we have considered the specificity of philosophic worldview and discovered the stages of philosophic thought formation such concepts as “process”, “development”, “contradiction”, “necessity”, “connection”, “cause” and others were considered. Different thinkers analyzed them during the whole history of philosophy. Some elemental ideas about development and changes were already encountered in the mythological picture of the world. At the same time different attempts to make transition from the visual-sensuous way of expressing contradictions of living space to its conceptual, abstract-logical description were made by thinkers of Ancient India, China and Greece. In the philosophy of Taoism they expressed ideas about the instability of truth, the impossibility of equilibrium.

We also know dialectics of Heraclitus with his famous “Panta rhei” – everything is flowing and “you cannot enter the same river twice”. Hereby the cause of changes was related to the interaction of opposites. So, most natural philosophers operated with pair categories: “cause and effect” (Thales, Empedocles), “chaos and harmony” (Pythagoras), “being and not-being” (Parmenides), “finite and infinite” (Anaximander, Zeno), “sensuous and rational” (Democritus). Later on it was called a naïve or spontaneous dialectics that appeared to be the first historical form of dialectics.

But as the first philosophers connected the ideas of changeability, motion, continuity with cosmos, nature and the world in general, then starting with the second half of the V century the study of development becomes the way of searching for truth through the conflict of different viewpoints (Socrates’ maieutics) and the method of analyses and synthesis of notions (Plato’s dialectics).

It was Socrates who first mentioned the word “dialectics” and then sophists, the representatives of Socrates’ schools and Plato’s Academy, orators and poets turned dialectics into the art of conversation. It became the first way of theorizing of people’s ideas about the world, man and society. There appeared an ability to understand that the categories were the most general notions, which people used. Space, matter, motion, form and other categories were not just words, but forms of thinking.

Thus, in the Antique philosophy the two approaches to understanding of dialectics were formed: the first one interpreted it as the art of conversation, the form of a dialogue, which was aimed at searching for truth, coordination and generalization of contradictory points of view; the second one characterized dialectics as a philosophizing method, directed to cognizing of general, true and objective.

In the Medieval epoch dialectics was interpreted within the framework of a debate concerning about the nature of the universals (from Latin universalis – general). The main task of it was to find the solution to the question about the existence of some real prototypes of general notions. In fact, that heated the discussion purposed to solve the problem of an adequate reflection of the reality in man’s thinking, but at the same time philosophers were divided into Realists (insisting that the general exists outside things), and Nominalists (believing that universals only exist in the human mind, in thought).

In the end of the XVIII and the beginning of the XIX centuries philosophers considered dialectics differently. It was contrasted with metaphysical and dogmatical way of thinking, which was characteristic for a methodological and scientific research. Taking God for the primary element, philosophers of the Modern Ages were intended to a description, registration and classification of empirical facts and their rational explanation.

The representatives of German classical philosophy (I. Kant, I. Fichte, F. Schelling, G. Hegel) opposed dialectics and metaphysics, called them differently directed, though interdependent ways of thinking. According to I. Kant, dialectics was the study of defining fundamental limitations and potentialities of human knowledge. G. Hegel gave newsense to dialectics. In his philosophy dialectics became not only the way of thinking but also the theory of development. Heworked out the fundamental principles of dialectical logics, the theory of laws and categories as the theory of cognition though on idealistic base. It was the second historical form of dialectics.

Following the same principle, К. Marx and F. Engels developed the theory of materialistic dialectics. Unlike Hegel, who took the ideal Absolute for the primordial and the source of development, Marx and Engels described the development as an inherent characteristic of nature and society. Human reasoning is able to reproduce this development through forming and giving content to appropriate categories and laws. Thus, Marxian philosophy differentiates objective and subjective dialectics. Objective dialectics reveals the laws of development of the objective reality independent from human will and consciousness. Subjective dialectics is a reflection of the objective dialectics in human consciousness. According to Marx and Engels this type of dialectics is objective in matter and subjective in form. In other words, although the laws of objective and subjective dialectics differ according to their forms, yet they are identical in matter. That statement can be represented by the following scheme:

Marxian materialistic dialectics was expressed in a system of philosophical principles, categories and laws and it appeared to be a means of understanding reality in all essential forms of its manifestation in nature, society and thought. This stage was the third historical form of dialectics.

Most of the streams of non-classical western philosophy just transformed the dialectical ideas of G. Hegel, K. Marx, and F. Engels according to their worldview principles. One of the most influential western theories of development, which ultimately goes back to metaphysical evolutionism, is Henry Bergson’s conception of creative evolution. Bergson saw the source of qualitative development in the idealist principle of elan vital which means, on the philosophical plane, a “need for creativity” attributed to such an ideal object as consciousness or, better say, “Superconsciousness”. According to it the source of development was conceived as an ideal force and placed outside the developing material object. Neo-Thomism (dialectical theology of K. Bart, P. Tillich) opposed religion and faith. Existentialism (J.-P. Sartre, K. Jaspers) differentiated dialectics of human existence, which interpreted existence of opposites as the indication of freedom. Negative dialectics (T. Adorno, H. Marcuse, J. Habermas and others) aimed at overcoming the opposition of classical dialectics (necessity-chance, possibility-reality and so on), and vanquishing man’s “one-sidedness” (H. Marcuse). Negative dialectics sees its basic task not to eliminate the contradictions but to seek for them; it also strives for gradual logical understanding of nonidentity, specificity of the world.

So, to sum up it is necessary to say that modern dialectics is man’s search for integrity, his aspiration to comprehend infinity, eternity and truth. Due to dialectics man overcomes the restrictions of formal logic, strives to coordinate the disjointness of his own world with understanding of the Absolute.

Thus, the above-mentioned historical forms of dialectics prove the fact that nowadays there exist three forms of it: idealistic dialectics (developed on the basis of Hegel’s objective idealism), Marxist dialectics (developed on the basis of materialism of K. Marx and F. Engels), and negative dialectics (developed by T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer to analyze the contradictions of the modern society development).

Dialectics in its all three forms is based on the need to consider all existing things (objects, phenomena and processes) in their interconnection, motion and development.

So, dialectics is one of the principal philosophical methods of creative cognition and thought based on connection and development in its most complete deep-going and comprehensive form.

Dialectics theoretically reproduces the development of matter, spirit, cognition and other aspects of the reality.

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