Is the World a Dialectical Place?

Abstract

Universal interconnection and universal change are what call for the dialectical method of inquiry. Superdeterminism requires that the changes coming to anything result, in part, from causes within it, but its perseverance nonetheless will mean these are temporarily counteracted: so every phenomenon is contradictory. Nor can change remain unchangingly incremental: at a threshold, quantity will be transformed into quality. Neither can the superseded remain unchangingly absent, or return just as before: hence, the negation of the negation.

Introductory

In a much quoted letter of March 11, 1895, Frederick Engels told Werner Sombart:

Marx’s whole way of thinking is not so much a doctrine as a method. It provides, not so much ready-made dogmas, as aids to further investigation and the method for such investigation (Engels 2004, 461).

We can take it Engels meant this remark, without reservation, to be about the way of thinking that he himself aspired to.

It is not too difficult to describe the Marxian historical method. Look to the classes in a society and their conflicts. Identify the ruling class in control of the means of production and proceed from there to the classes of those who toil, differentiated by their direct and indirect relations to the ruling class and the means of production. Identify the technological changes that in time revolutionize the production process and people’s daily existence, and disrupt the society’s class structure, all of this producing a politico-cultural revolution that then gives rise to a new way of life.

For sure, Engels would agree that the effectiveness of the historical materialist method depends upon some substantive general truths about the workings of society. Passing from the investigation of human history to dialectics, G. A. Cohen once asked how we can know what to make of dialectics without knowing if the world is or isn’t a dialectical sort of place. ¹ What must the world be like for the dialectical method to be any good when it comes to studying it?

Here is Engels in 1877:

When we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away (1987b, 21).

Dialectics … comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending (p. 23). ²

Having a method of inquiry tells you, generically, what to look for but doesn’t tell you specifically what you’re going to find or where you’ll find it. Look for interconnections everywhere; look for the seeds of change. That, in the furtherance of any inquiry, is what drives the dialectical method.

Had study of the real world reached the point by Engels’ time where a joint conclusion of universal movement and change, and universal interconnection, could reasonably be drawn? When it came, in the first place, to universal change, Engels certainly thought so. “All that exists deserves to perish,” he liked to say, paraphrasing a saying of the devil, Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s great poem Faust (Part I, act 1, scene 3, roughly quoted by Engels 1990, 359). ³ As for interconnection, he was prepared to specifically characterize dialectics as “the science of universal inter-connection” (1987a, 313). So, according to Engels, everything is connected to everything else. Nothing is altogether independent of anything else that it shares existence with, either at the same time or at a distance of time. For any two phenomena, if either one were to be at all different, the other one would be different for its part. As Engels saw it, science had shown and was showing more and more interconnections all the time. This goes beyond cause-and-effect “determinism,” the thesis that no occurring process will ever have differing outcomes on two occasions unless there is a difference as between those two occasions in what has occurred earlier in the process each time. ⁴ The universal interconnection thesis, or “superdeterminism,” as it is sometimes called (often derisively), is a claim certain to raise lots of hackles. ⁵ Determinism is bad enough, anti-Engelsians will say. How can Engels talk as he does of human liberation and then turn around and say that whatever happens is all determined?

Engels does say that. But to say things are determined is not to say they are all determined regardless of what people do. People can act effectively to change things – or sometimes to at least temporarily keep them from changing – because the things people do can be among the determining causes that will produce the resulting outcome. So to say things are determined, in the relevant sense, ⁶ doesn’t mean that they are all fixed no matter what.

What, though, about superdeterminism? It isn’t a question, of course, of the future causally fixing the present, for instance, or the present causing the past, as you might have imagined if you were a bit unwary – as of course you aren’t. You, dear reader, are surely quite innocent in actual fact, but if the fingerprints on the weapon used exactly matched yours, then that would make you the one who did the deed. Not that those fingerprints would make you do the deed, either by forcing you to do it or by causing you to do it through unthreatening inducements. It’s a trivial fact that the present doesn’t cause the past. But if – contrary to actual fact – those fingerprints were different from what they are, then it would be you who did the deed. Given all the surrounding circumstances, every fact is connected in just that way to every other fact. That is what the universal interconnection concept involves, neither more nor less. (For this purpose, we don’t have to count things like 2 x 2 = 4 as “facts.” And, of course, it will always remain a fact, for example, that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. The mere requirement of verbal self-consistency involves agreeing that these aren’t things that would be “subject to change”; see Engels 1987b, 81–83.)

Does this sort of thing amount to a Philosophy of Nature à la Hegel? Not according to Engels (1990, 386):

Today, when one needs to comprehend the results of natural science only dialectically, that is, in the sense of their own interconnection, in order to arrive at a ‘system of nature’ sufficient for our time; when the dialectical character of this interconnection is forcing itself against their will even into the metaphysically trained minds of the natural scientists, today the philosophy of nature is definitely discarded. Every attempt at resurrecting it would be not only superfluous but a step backwards. ⁷

(By “metaphysical,” recall, Engels means undialectical.) So Engels does favor systematizing scientific findings into a ‘system of nature’ sufficient for the times, however not some cosmic system, purporting to be eternal, dreamed up in a philosopher’s armchair.

And to say that anything that occurs makes a difference in the occurrence of everything else isn’t to say that in each instance it makes a difference that matters for the purposes of the inquiry in hand. Details are innumerable, and to distinguish between what is relevant and what is irrelevant for current purposes is of first importance, practically speaking, in any applied dialectics, though it’s of utmost importance likewise that this demarcation between what matters and what doesn’t matter is only relative and can change, or even reverse, from one context to another. In preparing food, everyone knows that the order of operations you perform sometimes matters and sometimes doesn’t. If you’re mixing two liquids, such as lemonade and cola, it can make no practical difference to the result whether you pour the lemonade into the cola or pour the cola into the lemonade.

Objections Raised Against Engelsian Dialectics

So, in methodological practice, the concepts of universal interconnection and universal change need to be applied in a relative and not an absolute way. Take, for example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the law behind ‘increasing entropy’). Take it exactly as stated, and it is something hard to square with universal interconnection. It says a procedure mixing hot and cold water, say, could produce a lukewarm result preserving absolutely no trace of the initial conditions. However, notice the word “could” here. Only certain kinds of trace-producing causes are excluded. Four or five generations ago metaphysically minded scientists projected forward in time to an eventual cosmic ‘heat death’, with all matter in the universe eventually reduced to an ultra-thin soup of separated particles, at a temperature just above absolute zero, and all movement and change permanently stilled. (They liked to compare this to a wind-up clock gradually running down, and to project backwards to a divine intelligence having initially wound the whole cosmic mechanism up.)

Then, consider Special Relativity, according to which any process of acceleration proceeding through to a velocity exceeding the speed of light – or any deceleration down to a velocity less than the speed of light – is physically impossible. At that rate, causal influence will be absolutely limited as to how fast and so how far in time and space it can be ‘propagated’. So it will be absolutely impossible for two events occurring sufficiently far apart in time and space to have any effect whatever upon each other.

And, thirdly, consider microphysics. According to well-evidenced quantum-mechanical theory, two uranium atoms, exactly alike as far as any physically possible way of testing them goes, and alike destined to undergo radioactive decay, by stages, into radium, can nevertheless begin decaying at different times, with no detectable difference to explain why one of them starts earlier. This is often brought up as an argument against determinism, never mind superdeterminism.

Relative Universality

On the other side of the debate, there is the history of science, which presents case after case of scientific laws being superseded by deeper laws explaining why the old laws in fact held good, but under certain conditions only. This has led to a so-called ‘pessimistic meta-induction’ according to which no scientific law is worthy of credence. But for optimistic dialecticians, the process is rather one of sublation, meaning that the old law is both cancelled and preserved. Thus, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is shown to govern the gravitational attraction between two bodies just insofar as their velocities relative to each other approximate to zero, and the strength of the ambient gravitational field is sufficiently low.

So it’s arguable that dialectics recommends formulating such laws in universal terms but according them only qualified credence. The formulation of a law has to be unconditional because it isn’t yet known what the limiting conditions are going to be. And adding a qualifying rider such as ‘under some conditions or other’ would render the formulations useless. Such law formulations would have next to no logical consequences: so they couldn’t be tested, and they couldn’t be applied.

This relative approach to scientific results naturally applies to the dialectical concepts of universal interconnection and universal change also. ⁸ Thus, Engels wrote in the Dialectics of Nature:

The eternal laws of nature … become more and more transformed into historical ones…. Nothing remains as absolutely universally valid except – motion (1987a, 517–518).

But he also wrote:

What … in Hegel appears as a development of the thought form of judgment as such, confronts us here as the development of our empirically based theoretical knowledge of the nature of motion in general….

The third judgment is that of universality: any form of motion proves able and compelled to undergo transformation into any other form of motion. In this form the law attains its final expression. By new discoveries we can give new illustrations of it, we can give it a new and richer content. But we cannot add anything to the law itself as here formulated. In its universality, equally universal in form and content, it is not susceptible of further extension: it is an absolute natural law (1987a, 505).

What was Engels thinking when he wrote this? Perhaps his thought was that the Conservation of Energy law, since it is all about “motion,” isn’t really at odds with the universality of motion. Or maybe he was thinking that scientific laws, in “their final expression,” need to be formulated in absolute, universal terms, so as to attain a historically relative “absoluteness” capable of lasting for centuries, even though not in fact forever.

Let’s remember that Engels’ Dialectics of Nature was a collection of folders he kept under that designation, into which he chucked thoughts he had from time to time, and drafts or partial drafts of pieces which he never got around to publishing – or, in some cases, which in fact he decided against publishing, but which he also did not throw out. We surely can take it, though, that in his published writings he expressed what were his considered views, at least at the time of writing.

This brings us to the subject of progress, or Progress, a big topic for nineteenth-century thinkers. Engels was a progressive, and he was very much in favor of change for the better. And he believed in overall historical progress; he thought that over the centuries, despite ups and downs, real advances had been made and would continue to be made through the achievement of communism. But it is a question beyond that whether long-run progress is actually built right into the nature of things by virtue of some godlike Hegelian Weltgeist or similar cosmic force.

Commenting in The Dialectics of Nature on the Darwinian “struggle for existence” and its evolutionary result, Engels wrote regarding

selection by greater capacity of adaptation to altered circumstances, where the survivors are better suited to these circumstances, but where this adaptation as a whole can mean regress just as well as progress (for instance adaptation to parasitic life is always regress).

The main thing: that each advance in organic evolution is at the same time a regression, fixing one-sided evolution and excluding the possibility of evolution in many other directions (1987a, 583).

Engels doesn’t say why he considers that adaptation to parasitic life is necessarily a case of regression. Maybe that’s because it narrows the range of possibilities for future evolution by fixing the organism’s environment.

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (from 1888), Engels praised Hegel’s dialectical philosophy for revealing “the transitory character of everything and in everything: nothing can endure against it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away, of ascending without end from the lower to the higher.” But he quickly adds:

It is not necessary, here, to go into the question of whether this outlook is thoroughly in accord with the present state of natural science, which predicts a possible end for the earth itself and for its habitability a fairly certain one; which therefore recognises that for the history of mankind, too, there is not only an ascending but also a descending branch. At any rate we are still a considerable distance from the turning-point at which the historical course of society becomes one of descent (1990, 360).

However, at the end of a Dialectics of Nature text of 1875–76 which he labelled “Old Introduction” — in a paragraph which has since afforded anti-Engelsians occasion for some glee at his expense – Engels allowed himself to write (though not to publish):

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 beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapor, 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. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space; however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away; however long it may last before, in one solar system and only on one planet, the conditions for organic life develop; however innumerable the organic beings, too, that have to arise and pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy – we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it (1987a, 334–335).

“Somewhere else,” Engels says. (Of course, like everybody at the time, he is taking pre-Einstein absolute space for granted.) Therefore, even though he does use the phrase “eternal cycle,” he isn’t talking about an “eternal recurrence,” an exact repetition of the same states and events every so-many years/eons. It isn’t clear what he has in mind as being matter’s “attributes”; though, if he considers thought to be one of them, the impossibility he claims of that attribute ever being “lost” won’t mean that it cannot come to be absent from the scene for many eons, what stays present throughout being just the potential for thought to develop out of matter. If change is universal and nothing lasts forever, then something’s absence cannot last forever, though; and just this, as applied to thought, may be all that Engels means. Or he might conceivably mean that only a special subset of material facts are examples of matter’s “attributes.” We don’t have to decide this interpretive question concerning a passage which Engels never published.

In any case, he did expressly say in print in his 1880 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution (1989, 301).

If not a perpetually recurring circle then, what about a perpetual process of evolution, proceeding (with whatever temporary deviations) in some given direction – especially a progressive direction, as Hegel believed? Engels won’t say that. If nothing goes on forever, neither will that. ⁹

Spiralling Development

Might it be that any continued development in one line of direction is in fact only relative ultimately, forming just an arc, as it were, in a longer-run circling process? Might it be that any repeated circling is only relative ultimately, occurring within a process which uses successive loops, so to speak, to form a longer-run spiral headed in one line of direction? That would be consistent with seeing everything as interconnected and everything as transitory. The cycle of day and night is not an exact recurrence, but advances unevenly the onset of a new season, while the seasons for their part cycle round in the loops of a developing process which cumulatively eventuates in overall climatic change. And so on. Without any limit to time, movement would be neither directional nor cyclical overall (cf. White 1938, 378, n. 4).

Here is an extract from an 1878 draft outline of a work on the dialectics of nature which Engels never wrote:

Dialectics as the science of universal inter-connection. Main laws: transformation of quantity and quality – mutual penetration of polar opposites and transformation into each other when carried to extremes – development through contradiction or negation of the negation – spiral form of development (1987a, 313).

A year later, Engels wrote this under the heading “Dialectics”:

It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted…. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:

The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;

The law of the interpenetration of opposites;

The law of the negation of the negation.

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logik, in “Die Lehre vom Seyn”; the second fills the whole of the second and by far the most important part of his Logik, “Die Lehre vom Wesen”; finally the third figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the whole system…. If we turn the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday (p. 356).

Interconnection of the Dialectical Laws

In a rare complaint, Lenin – who had no access to the discussions of dialectics in Engels’ Dialectics of Nature texts – remarked that Engels treated the unity of opposites as “the sum-total of examples” merely. (“But it is 'in the interests of popularization …,'” Lenin added [1961, 359].)

Answering this complaint in advance, Engels went on, in the next sentence but one following the words of his just quoted:

We are not concerned here with writing a handbook of dialectics, but only with showing that the dialectical laws are real laws of development of nature, and therefore are valid also for theoretical natural science. Hence we cannot go into the inner inter-connection of these laws with one another (1987a, 357).

Since Engels, the dialectical laws’ inner interconnection with one another has arguably been a subject too little addressed in writings on materialist dialectics. The object here is to contribute towards filling that gap.

Take the dialectical contradiction law, the law of the Unity and Interpenetration of Opposites. Within anything, it is claimed, there are causes tending against each other’s effects. As Hegel says in the Encyclopedia Logic: “Everything actual contains opposed determinations within it” (1991, 93). ¹⁰ If everything is transitory and everything is interconnected, then, without exception, anything whatsoever will eventually come to an end, as a consequence of causes within it, unless external causes destroy it first. But, if it does not come to an end immediately, these causes now operating within it to cause its destruction must be temporarily counteracted by other, contrary-tending causes.

Or take the Transformation of Quantity into Quality and Vice Versa. According to this conception, there are, throughout all that exists, what Hegel called nodal points – otherwise known as thresholds, tipping points or points of inflection. Gradual, evolutionary changes in anything result in incremental alterations in its properties, until one of those nodal points is reached, and that thing is then relatively suddenly caused to turn into something different in kind; and any such qualitative difference involves from then on different values for the various quantitative features it has. Hegel says in the Encyclopedia Logic:

Everything has its measure; i.e., things are quantitatively determinate, and their being of this or that magnitude is indifferent for them; but at the same time, there is a limit to this indifference, the overstepping of which by a further increase or decrease means that the things cease to be what they were (1991, 136). ¹¹

This consequence too follows from universal interconnection and universal change. As causes vary in magnitude, their effects will be apt to vary correspondingly – up to a point. Everything being transitory as well as interconnected, such a linear correlation will not go on forever but will sooner or later lead to a more drastic alteration resulting.

According to a dialectical way of thinking, both nature and human nature (collective as well as individual) exhibit “levels” of organization, at different scales of magnitude, demarcated by more or less precise nodal points. And so, like necessity, chance is real but relative – relative to context; and there is not any absolute context. There are real patterns in the flux of events, but no absolutely unconditional patterns. And likewise no absolute element of chanciness in the things occurring, no indeterminacy in what goes on that is absolutely immune to explanation.

For instance, a roulette wheel is objectively chancy in its spin. It has to be, to be any good, except for cheating. Yet each spin will be completely caused by a host of different factual details acting together to determine just where the wheel will come to rest. However, the determination of each one of those details, located at different spots around the wheel, will depend in turn on a variety of chance circumstances. And so it goes. Then, on the other hand, the resulting combined tendency of all the spins of the casino’s roulette wheels is going to be highly predictable. Each customer who comes in has, say, a sum of x to gamble with, and each will be apt to quit upon winning, say, 2× – or else, upon losing just x. It isn’t chancy which is going to happen first in most cases, so the house is bound to come out ahead over time – apart from its official cut and all charges for refreshment and entertainment. But the success or failure of each individual casino, faced with the pressures of competition, payoff demands from the mob and fluctuations in customer patronage, will again be something more or less chancy. And so on.

In Engels’ words, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, IV: “What is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer accidents and … the allegedly accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself” (1990, 384). ¹²

Then there is what’s called, following Hegel, the Negation of the Negation. Hegel was indeed enough of a theist to believe in a guaranteed advance from “lower” to “higher,” though Engels (as we have seen) had strong reservations about that. In his Greater Logic, Hegel wrote:

The negation …. is a fresh Notion but higher and richer than its predecessor; for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but also something more, and is the unity of itself and its opposite (1969, 54).

That, however, is only about a first negation, not a negation of the negation. In due course, we later read:

The negative judgement is already in and for itself the second negation or the negation of the negation…. With this … the restoration of the concrete totality has been achieved, or rather, the subject is now for the first time posited as an individual, for through negation and the sublating of the negation it is mediated with itself (641).

Turning the thing round as Engels says, what we have, materialistically speaking, is the restoration of something that was previously superseded, however on a qualitatively new basis now – though preserving while it cancels that which the “first negation” substituted for the original phenomenon. ¹³

Laws About Laws

The laws of dialectics are like the Conservation of Energy law, which we have seen Engels celebrating. Each of them is a pattern in the patterns of natural processes and human affairs. They are thus alike as far as observational “falsifiability” goes. According to the Conservation of Energy law, if a fall in the level of energy presents itself, the missing energy has gone somewhere or taken on some new form, but where it has gone or what new form it has taken on isn’t specified in the Conservation of Energy law, so a failure to find the missing energy doesn’t immediately refute the law. Similarly, the laws of dialectics tell us what sorts of twists and turns to look for in nature and in human affairs, but they do not tell us where we are going to find them.

The advice to researchers is just to look for contradictions in things, look for transformations of quantity into quality and vice versa and look for negations-of-the-negation.

That is the dialectical method of inquiry.