Laws of Dialectics

Practical experience constantly demonstrates that the processes going on in the world are not a chaos of raging elemental forces. The universe has a code of laws of its own. Every­where we observe order coextensive with the world: the planets move along their strictly determined paths; however long a night may be, day will inevitably come; the young grow old and depart this life with implacable necessity, and a new generation is born to re­place the older one.

Everything in the world, beginning with the motion of physi­cal fields, elementary particles, atoms, crystals, and ending with giant cosmic systems, social events and the realm of the spirit, is subject to regularity.

Century after century man noted the strictly determined order of the universe and recurrence of various phenomena; all this sug­gested the idea of the existence of something law-governed. The concept of law is a product of mature thought: it took shape at a late stage in the formation of society, at a time when science evolved as a system of knowledge.

A law is an essential, stable, regular and necessary type of connec­tion between phenomena considered in a generalized form and ad­justed to the typologically classified conditions of its manifestation. Laws as relations of essence or between essences are guarantees of the world's stability, harmony, and at the same time its develop­ment.

Laws are divided into: particular ones, valid only in a limited area, e.g. the laws of social development, which are only manifested at the level of the social form of the motion of matter; general laws, which characterize several types of motion and forms of material existence (e.g., the law of conservation of energy, the law of gravitation, the law of productive forces development and so on); universal laws permeating through all spheres of the objective world – nature, society and thinking, are dialectical laws, which are of the same character.

The basic dialectical laws are: 1) the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, 2) the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, 3) the law of negation. There are also secondary laws of dialectics, which reveal different sides and peculiarities of the process of development. In the contemporary philosophy they are called correlative categories: phenomenon and essence, cause and effect, possibility and reality, content and form, and others.

Thus, dialectics is the theory of development in its broadest interpretation. To understand what development is we need to answer such questions: what is the source of development?, what is the character of it? (how does development work?), what is the direction of development? The basic dialectical laws give the answers to these questions. Let’s characterize them briefly.

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