Dialectical Materialism
Ish Mishra
The term Dialectical Materialism was not used by Marx himself
but by subsequent Marxists to delineate the synthesis of Marx’s critiques of
Hegel’s Dialectics, which he called idealist and Feuerbach’s materialism, which
he called mechanical or metaphysical. For the first time the term Dialectical
Materialism was used by Plekhanov in 1891.Five years after Marx’s death Engels
expressed his and Marx’s gratitude in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical
German Philosophy (1888) “To Feuerbach , who after all, in many respects forms
the link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception”. For the “influence
which Feuerbach, more than any post Hegelian philosopher” had upon them Engels
acknowledged his “undischarged debt of honor”. [SW: 585][1] .
Diamat (dialectical materialism) was one of the key words in the
discussions among the first generation of Marxists, after Marx. Diamat is
considered to be the Marxist philosophy -- the world view -- related to and
supported by, what is known as Marxist science -- historical materialism.
Dialectical materialism is union of two main strands of philosophy prevalent in
Europe in the 19th century – the materialism of the enlightenment
era of scientific revolution, which Marx calls metaphysical or mechanical and
the dialectics of Hegel, which he calls idealist or ideological -- that Marx
inherited, rejected and transformed.
According to Hegel, reality is wholly or basically constituted
by thoughts or ideas. Drawing the distinction between the appearance and inner
world – the essence – Hegel claims that the inner reality is concealed by, and
is reverse of its phenomenal form. “By the law of this inverted world, then,
the selfsame in the first world is unlike of it and unlike in the first is equally
unlike to itself. …. what by the law of first is sweet is, in this inverted
reality, sour; what is there black is here white[2].” In reaction to this Marx
asserts, as said before, that truth must be proved in practice, in this world
and not in the obscurities of its inversion, the abstract ideas. In the
labyrinth of philosophical jargons Hegel obfuscates the reality transporting
Plato’s World of Ideas into the vocabulary of classical German Philosophy and
his Ideal state into Prussian monarchy. According to Hegel, “looked at one
surface this inverted world is anti-thesis of the first in the sense that it
has the latter outside itself and repels that world from itself as an inverted
reality; that the one is the sphere of appearance, while the other is the
inherent being; that one is the world as it is for another, the other again the
world again as it is for itself.”[3] [Phenomenology of Mind,
Larrain; 122]
But unlike Kant, for whom, the inner reality was so different
from phenomenal that it could not be known, Hegel’s these two worlds are not
dichotomous. Appearance is the manifestation of the essence and essence is the
truth of appearance.
“Thus the super-sensible world, which is the inverted world, has
at the same time reached out beyond the other world has in itself the other, it
is to itself conscious of being inverted, i.e. it is the inverted form of
itself; it is that world itself and its opposite in a single unity”[4]
Through the contradiction of essence and appearance, Hegel
reached the ‘distinction per say, in the ‘form of infinity’ or ‘absolute
motion’. This is the ‘ultimate nature of life, soul of the world, the universal
life-blood’ which is itself ‘every distinction that arises, as well as that
into which all distinctions are dissolved’[5]. [Phenomenology of Mind,
Larrain; 123] This means that the internal distinction is self-identity and
self-consciousness, if so the distinction between appearance and essence in the
natural world is a reflection in the distinction between self-consciousness
materiality itself becomes the inverted and the distinction between
consciousness and its object is thus eliminated. As Marx put it in his critique
of Hegel,
“The main point is that the object or consciousness is nothing
else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified
self-consciousness, self-consciousness as object.”[6] [EPM, Larrain; 123]
Hegel identifies alienation with objectification in terms of
producing object. Consciousness is absolutely alien to itself. Objectivity
therefore is alienated self-consciousness. To overcome alienation, i.e. to
re-appropriate self-consciousness implies to transcend the objectivity. And
consciousness is the essence, the reality; hence the process takes place in
consciousness. To overcome the alienation and inversion it entails, is merely
the recognition by the consciousness that the objectivity is its own inverted
creation. As Marx puts it, “the appropriation of man’s objectified and
estranged essential powers is therefore firstly only an appropriation which takes
place in conciseness in pure thought.”[7] [EPM, Larrain: 123] Thus the
notion of inversion is defined in epistemological terms natural consequence of
the process of production of thought and the simultaneous production of reality
as it’s opposite.
Marx takes the inversion from Hegel and reverses the thesis. By
means of their conscious practice, humans produce objective power that forms
the basis for the relations of production and forces of production.
Objectification of human practice is not alienating in itself but result of the
lack of control over that objective power. Alienation is result of particular
kind of inhuman objectification in which the men and women don’t control its
results but are controlled by them. For Hegel, “it is not the fact that the
human essence objectifies itself in an inhuman way, in opposition to itself but
that it objectifies itself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract
thought.”[8] [Phenomenology of Mind,
Larraine; 124] For Hegel inversion is inherent in the self-consciousness and
for Marx, it is an attribute of a particular social condition. The
consciousness does not generate the inverted objective reality but the inverted
reality generates the inverted consciousness. If the religion is the inverted
consciousness of the world it is because state and society that invented the
religion are an inverted world. In Hegel’s criticism, Marx writes, ‘having
superseded religion and recognized it as a product of self-alienation, he still
finds himself confirmed in religion as religion,. Here is the root of Hegel’s
false positivism or his merely an apparent criticism””. [EPM, Larrain: 125]
Prussian State, objectification: manifestations of self-comciousness:
self-realization of idea.
In German Ideology, Marx and Engels extensively criticize
Hegel’s conception of history and objective reality as the inverted appearance
of self-consciousness which in turn is the inversion of reality. In this
conception human activity appears as the product of something other than itself
and consciousness being a product of man’s head, appears as the producer.
According to them this is the inversion of order between copiousness and
material conditions. Explanation of material practice from consciousness is
inversion of the reality that consciousness is determined by material practice.
German ideologists were fighting against the illusions of consciousness which
they believed, constituted the real chains for men and women instead of
fighting against the German social and political reality. This inversion is not
just the epistemological distortion produced by consciousness but its origin
lie in reality itself – upside down standing on its head and hence needs to be
set right by turning it upside down.
There are two inversions – inversion of consciousness and the
inversion of the objectified social practice. The former is ideology and the
latter, alienation.
All that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real –
philosophical benediction to despotism and everything.
In the course of its development reality proves to be necessity
like the Prussian monarchy and its coercive state apparatuses. Roman Republic
was real and hence rational and hence necessary like the Roman Empire that
followed it. They became unreal and hence irrational and hence unnecessary.
French Monarchy was real till it was destroyed by revolution, tendering it
unreal. So were the European colonial rules in Asia and Africa, which became
unreal with the succeeding national liberation movements. The revolutionary
implication derived by Engels is that anything that exists is destined to
perish.
Moribund reality being transformed into a new viable reality, “peacefully if the old one has enough intelligence to go to its death without a struggle; forcibly if it resists this necessity. Thus Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself”[9]. [SW: 587]. The proposition of rationality of everything which is real implies all that exists deserves to perish. This implicit rejection of the eternity and absoluteness of truth is essentially the rejection of the theory of final truth that once discovered can be remembered by heart through generations.
“Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long
historical development of science, which mounts from lower to higher levels of
knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called final truth, a point
from which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do
but fold its hand and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it has
attained.”[10]
It holds as true for philosophical knowledge as for any other
knowledge and practical action. All successive historical systems are
transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from
lower to higher, each stage is necessary.
The Feuerbachian materialism claims that the reality is wholly
or basically material. In the Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach places
materialism at the center. Nature exists independent of all the philosophy.
Nothing exists outside nature and man and the concept of higher being/supreme
power created by religious fantasies are the fantastic reflections of our own
essence. Due to inability to look at the history as a process, he did not want
to abolish but perfect the religion to be absorbed in the philosophy. Marx saw
in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion proposing the man as the highest being for
man forms a starting point for a truly revolutionary philosophy. His claim that
Hegel had reversed the role of subject and predicate treating man as an
attribute of thought leads Marx ‘to turn Hegel on his head’ and his genetic
method of inquiry into genesis and function of social institutions was carried
forward by Marx in materialist interpretation of history[11].
Dialectical Materialism does away with the exclusion. It
considers reality to be a dialectical unity of the both, with the primacy to
the material world. Marx reverses Hegel’s primacy and absoluteness of ideas and
explains that the reality is neither a static substance nor an abstract idea
but a causally connected totality, internally unified and contradictory.
Dialectical materialism rejects the absoluteness or primacy of ideas and unlike
mechanical materialists does not reduce the ideas to matter as their ultimate
identity. Reality is dialectical and contradictory. Its contradictions put it
in the process of motion bringing about continuous, evolutionary, quantitative
changes and when these contradictions are matured, revolutionary qualitative
changes with genuine novelty take place and lead the history into a new epoch.
In this sense, the laws governing nature society and human thought are
dialectical and science attempts to discover them. Capital as the scientific
study of capitalism discloses that the bourgeois society has a material base,
its economic structure with irreconcilable contradiction and their gradual
intensification would inevitably produce a revolutionary transformation of the
whole society from capitalism to socialism. In the Capital, Marx attempt to
formulate such laws.
Dialectical Materialism holds that material and ideal are
opposites in a unity and that the matter is primary and not the mind. Matter
can exist without mind but not the vice versa. Mind historically emerged from
matter and remains dependent and acts upon it. For example, specific natural
sciences form a unified hierarchy with physics as the base but are not
reducible to physics. Physics gives the idea of mind-independent reality! The
dialectics asserts that this concrete reality is neither static nor a thing of
undifferentiated unity but a differentiated, dialectical unity of contradictory
opposites and their conflict is the driving force of constant, progressive
change. The laws of Dialectical materialism characterize the whole reality and
hence cannot be put in the category of classical notion of philosophy dominated
by normative epistemology. Engels claims in Anti-During that philosophy has
been superseded by science but theorizes theoretical thinking that seeks “to
bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one
another. In doing so, however natural science enters the field of theory and
here the methods of empiricism will not work, here the theoretical thinking can
be of assistance.”[12] But in this non-empirical
theoretical thinking, “the interconnection are not built in the facts but
discovers in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by
experiment. [1st 100:248-9] Theory constructs the concepts of the
interconnections but does not constitute the interconnections, which exist
independently of the theory, in material reality.
Basic laws of dialectical materialism can be summed up as:
·
Law of dialectical
constitution and contradictions of the reality in terms of dialectical unity of
the opposites, of the object and its idea in an inter-causal relationship with
the priority of the object. This dialectical unity of the matter and mind constitutes
the totality of the reality and is the moving force of the history.
·
Law of transformation
of quantity into quality; gradual evolutionary, quantitative changes give rise
to revolutionary qualitative changes.
·
Law of negation of
negation; one opposite negates the other and in turn is negated by an advanced
historical development, which is different from, but, preserves the elements of,
both.
·
Anything that exists
is destined to perish, capitalism cannot be the exception.
HCl + NaOH == NaCl + H2O.
[1]
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in one volume, Progress,
Moscow, 1977, SW henceforth.
[2]
Quoted in Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind,
Humanities Press, 1983 p. 118
[3]
Ibid
[4]
Ibid p. 120
[5]
ibid
[7]
ibid
[8]
ibid
[9]
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and End of Classical German Philosophy, SW. p
587
[10]
Ibid p. 589
[11]
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Published by the MSAC Philosophy
Group, 2008 (written in 1841)
[12]
Engels, Dialectics of Nature, SW p.
Edited on 22.04.2018
I congratulate you for this essay.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I will post one introduction to Marx and his ideas. Planing to write on different topics.
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