Dialectics and Metaphysics
Maurice Cornforth
PART TWO: DIALECTICS
6. Dialectics and Metaphysics
Dialectics, as a method of investigation, a method of thinking, is opposed to metaphysics. The metaphysical way of thinking deals with abstractions. It considers things each by itself, in abstraction from their real conditions of existence and interconnections; and it considers things as fixed and frozen, in abstraction from their real change and development. Consequently it invents rigid formulas and is always posing hard and fast antitheses—“either-or.” It fails to comprehend the unity and struggle of opposite processes and tendencies manifested in all phenomena of nature and society.
In contrast to metaphysics, the aim of dialectics is to trace the real changes and interconnection in the world and to think of things always in their real motion and interconnection.
Dialectical materialism, the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist Party, is materialist in its theory, its interpretation and explanation of everything, dialectical in its method.
We have seen how materialist explanation is opposed to idealist explanation. And then we saw how materialists formerly interpreted things in a mechanist way, but how mechanistic materialism proved inadequate to explain real processes of change and development. For this we need materialist dialectics. We need to study and understand things dialectically.
The dialectical method is, indeed, nothing but the method of studying and understanding things in their real change and development.
As such, it stands opposed to metaphysics.
What is metaphysics? Or more exactly, what is the metaphysical way of thinking, which is opposed by the dialectical way of thinking?
Metaphysics is essentially an abstract way of thinking. In a sense all thinking is “abstract,” since it works with general concepts and cannot but disregard a great deal of particular and unessential detail. For example, if we say that “men have two legs,” we are thinking of the two-leggedness of men in abstraction from their other properties, such as having a head, two arms and so on; and similarly we are thinking of all men in general, disregarding the individuality of particular men, of Peter, Paul and so on. But there is abstraction and abstraction. Metaphysics is distinguished by the fact that it makes false, misleading abstractions. As Engels once pointed out, “the art of working with concepts is not inborn... but requires real thought”;[32] the art of right thinking involves learning how to avoid metaphysical abstraction.
Suppose, for example, we are thinking about men, about “human nature.” Then we should think about human nature in such a way that we recognize that men live in society and that their human nature cannot be independent of their living in society but develops and changes with the development of society. We shall then form ideas about human nature which correspond to the actual conditions of men’s existence and to their change and development. But yet people often think about “human nature” in a very different way, as though there were such a thing as “human nature” which manifested itself quite independent of the actual conditions of human existence and which was always and everywhere exactly the same. To think in such a way is obviously to make a false, misleading abstraction. And it is just such an abstract way of thinking that we call “metaphysics.”
The concept of fixed, unchanging “human nature” is an example of metaphysical abstraction, of the metaphysical way of thinking.
The metaphysician does not think in terms of real men, but of “Man” in the abstract.
Metaphysics, or the metaphysical way of thinking, is, then, that way of thinking which thinks of things (1) in abstraction from their conditions of existence, and (2) in abstraction from their change and development. It thinks of things (1) in separation one from another, ignoring their interconnections, and (2) as fixed and frozen, ignoring their change and development.
One example of metaphysics has already been given. It is not difficult to find plenty more. Indeed, the metaphysical way of thinking is so widespread, and has become so much part and parcel of current bourgeois ideology, that there is hardly an article in a journal, a talk on the radio, or a book by a learned professor, in which examples of metaphysical fallacy are not to be found.
A good deal is said and written, for example, about democracy. But the speakers and writers usually refer to some pure or absolute democracy, which they seek to define in abstraction from the actual development of society, of classes and of class struggle. But there can be no such pure democracy; it is a metaphysical abstraction. If we want to understand democracy we have always to ask: democracy for whom, for the exploiters or the exploited? We have to understand that since democracy is a form of government, there is no democracy which is not associated with the rule of some particular class, and that the democracy which is established when the working class is the ruling class is a higher form of democracy than capitalist democracy, just as capitalist democracy is a higher form of democracy than, say, the slave-owners’ democracy of ancient Greece. In other words, we should not try to think of democracy in abstraction from real social relations and from the real change and development of society.
Again, pacifists try to base their opposition to war on the idea that “all wars are wrong.” They think of war in the abstract, without reflecting that the character of each particular war is determined according to the historical epoch, the aims of the war and the classes in whose interests it is fought. Consequently they fail to distinguish between imperialist wars and wars of liberation, between unjust war and just war.
In most British schools today the children are regularly subjected to “intelligence tests.” It is alleged that each child possesses a certain fixed quantity of “intelligence,” which can be estimated without regard to the actual conditions of the child’s existence and which determines his capabilities throughout the whole of his life regardless of whatever conditions for change and development may subsequently come in his way. This is another example of metaphysics. In this case the metaphysical conception of “intelligence” is used as an excuse for denying educational opportunities to the majority of children on the grounds that their intelligence is too low for them to benefit from such opportunities.
In general, metaphysics is a way of thinking which tries to fix the nature, properties and potentialities of everything it considers once and for all. Consequently it presupposes that each thing has a fixed nature and fixed properties.
And it thinks in terms of “things” rather than “processes.” It tries to sum up everything in a formula, which says that the whole world, or any part of the world which is under consideration, consists of just such and such things with such and such properties. Such a formula we may call a “metaphysical” formula.
Thus Engels refers to “the old method of investigation and thought which Hegel calls ‘metaphysical,’ which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable.”[33]
In philosophy, metaphysics often means the search for the “ultimate constituents of the universe.” Thus the materialists who said that the ultimate constituents were small, solid, material particles were just as much metaphysicians as the idealists who said that the ultimate constituents were spirits. All such philosophers thought they could sum up “the ultimate nature of the universe” in some formula. Some have held this formula, some that, but all have been metaphysicians. Yet it has been a hopeless quest. We cannot sum up the whole infinite changing universe in any such formula. And the more we find out about it, the more is this evident.
It should now be clear that the mechanistic materialism which we discussed in the preceding chapters can equally well be called metaphysical materialism.
We may also note, in passing, that certain philosophers today, the so-called positivists,[34] claim to be against “metaphysics” because they claim to reject any philosophy which seeks for “the ultimate constituents of the universe.” For them, “metaphysics” means any theory which deals with “ultimates” not verifiable in sense-experience. By using the term in this way, they conceal the fact that they themselves are, if anything, more metaphysical than any other philosophers. For their own mode of thinking reaches extremes of metaphysical abstraction. What could be more metaphysical than to imagine, as the positivist philosophers do, that our sense-experience exists in abstraction from the real material world outside us? Indeed, they themselves make “sense-experience” into a metaphysical “ultimate.”
In opposition to the abstract, metaphysical way of thinking, dialectics teaches us to think of things in their real changes and interconnections. To think dialectically is to think concretely, and to think concretely is to think dialectically. When we oppose the dialectical method to metaphysics, then we show up the inadequacy, one-sidedness or falsity of the abstractions of metaphysics.
This consideration enables us to understand the original meaning of the term “dialectics.” The word is derived from the Greek dialego, meaning to discuss or debate. It was considered that to discuss a question from all sides, and from all angles, allowing different one-sided points of view to oppose and contradict each other during the debate, was the best method of arriving at the truth. Such was the dialectics employed, for example, by Socrates. When anyone claimed to have a formula which answered some questions once and for all, Socrates would enter into discussion with him and, by forcing him to consider the question from different angles, would compel him to contradict himself and so to admit that his formula was false. By this method Socrates considered that it was possible to arrive at more adequate ideas about things.
The Marxist dialectical method develops from and includes dialectics in the sense in which it was understood by the Greeks. But it is far richer in content, far wider in its scope. As a result, it becomes something qualitatively new as compared with pre-Marxist dialectics—a new revolutionary method. For it is combined with a consistent materialism and ceases to be a mere method of argument, becoming a method of investigation applicable to both nature and society, a method of materialist understanding of the world which grows out of and guides the activity of changing the world.
The Metaphysical “Either-Or”
Metaphysics presupposes that each thing has its own fixed nature, its own fixed properties, and considers each thing by itself, in isolation. It tries to settle the nature and properties of each thing as a given, separate object of investigation, not considering things in their interconnection and in their change and development.
Because of this, metaphysics thinks of things in terms of hard and fast antitheses. It opposes things of one sort to things of another sort: if a thing is of one sort, it has one set of properties; if of another sort, it has another set of properties; the one excludes the other, and each is thought of in separation from the other.
Thus Engels writes:
“To the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other, apart from each other, rigid fixed objects of investigation given once and for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. ‘His communication is Yea, yea, Nay, nay, for whatever is more than these cometh of evil.’ For him a thing either exists or it does not exist; it is equally impossible for a thing to be itself and at the same time something else.”[35]
Philosophers have expressed the essence of this metaphysical way of thinking in the formula: “Each thing is what it is, and not another thing.” This may sound no more than plain common sense. But that only shows that so-called common sense itself conceals misleading ideas which need to be brought into the open. This way of thinking prevents us from studying things in their real changes and interconnections—in all their contradictory aspects and relationships, in their process of changing from “one thing” into “another thing.”
It is not only philosophers who are metaphysicians.
There are left-wing trade unionists, for example, who are as metaphysical as any school of philosophers. For them everyone at their trade union local meeting is either a class-conscious militant or else he is a right-wing opportunist. Everyone must fit into one or other category, and once he is down as “right wing” he is finished so far as they are concerned. That some worker who has been their opponent in the past and on some issues may yet prove an ally in the future and on other issues is not allowed for in their metaphysical outlook on life.
In one of Moliere’s plays there is a man who learns for the first time about prose. When they explain to him what prose is, he exclaims: “Why, I’ve been speaking prose all my life!”
Similarly, there are many workers who may well say: “Why, I’ve been a metaphysician all my life!”
The metaphysician has his formula ready for everything. He says—Either this formula fits or it does not. If it does, that settles it. If it does not, then he has some alternative formula ready. “Either-or, but not both” is his motto. A thing is either this or that; it has either this set of properties or that set of properties; two things stand to one another either in this relationship or in that.
The use of the metaphysical “either-or” leads people into countless difficulties.
For example, difficulties are felt in understanding the relations between American and British imperialism today. For it is argued: Either they are working together, or else they are not. If they are working together, then there is no rift between them; if there is a rift between them, then they are not working together. But on the contrary, they are working together and yet there are rifts between them; and we cannot understand the way they work together nor fight them effectively unless we understand the rifts which divide them.
Again, difficulties are felt in understanding the possibility of the peaceful co-existence of capitalist and socialist states. For it is argued: Either they can co-exist peacefully, in which case antagonism between capitalism and socialism must cease; or else the antagonism remains, in which case they cannot co-exist peacefully. But on the contrary, the antagonism remains, and yet the striving of the socialist states and of millions of people in all countries for peace can prevent a war between capitalist and socialist states.
It is often difficult to avoid a metaphysical way of thinking. And this is because, misleading as it is, it yet has its roots in something very necessary and useful.
It is necessary for us to classify things—to have some system of classifying them and assigning their properties and relations. That is a prerequisite of clear thinking. We have to work out what different kinds of things there are in the world, to say that these have these properties as distinct from those which have those other properties, and to say what are their relations.
But when we go on to consider these things and properties and relations each in isolation, as fixed constants, as mutually exclusive terms, then we begin to go wrong. For everything in the world has many different and indeed contradictory aspects, exists in intimate relationship with other things and not in isolation, and is subject to change. And so it frequently happens that when we classify something as “A” and not “B,” then this formula is upset by its changing from “A” into “B,” or by its being “A” in some relationships and “B” in others, or by its having a contradictory nature, part “A” and part “B.”
For example, we all know the difference between birds and mammals, and that while birds lay eggs mammals, in general, produce their young alive and suckle them. Naturalists used to believe that mammals were rigidly distinguished from birds because, among other things, mammals do not lay eggs. But this formula was completely upset when an animal called the platypus was discovered, for while the platypus is undoubtedly a mammal, it is a mammal which lays eggs. What is the explanation of this irregular behavior of the platypus? It is to be found in the evolutionary relationship of birds and mammals, which are both descended from original egg-laying animals. The birds have continued to lay eggs while the mammals stopped doing so—except for a few conservative animals like the platypus. If we think of animals in their evolution, their development, this appears very natural. But if we try, as the older naturalists tried, to make them fit into some rigid, fixed scheme of classification, then the products of evolution upset that classification.
Again, an idea or a theory which was progressive in one set of circumstances, when it first arose, cannot for that reason be labeled “progressive” in an absolute sense, since it may later become reactionary in new circumstances. For instance, mechanistic materialism when it first arose was a progressive theory. But we cannot say that it is still progressive today. On the contrary, under the new circumstances which have arisen mechanistic theory has become retrograde, reactionary. Mechanism, which was progressive in the rising phase of capitalism, goes hand in hand with idealism as part of the ideology of capitalism in decay.
Common sense, too recognizes the limitation of the metaphysical way of thinking.
For example: When is a man bald? Common sense recognizes that though we can distinguish bald men from non-bald men, nevertheless baldness develops through a process of losing one’s hair, and therefore men in the midst of this process enter into a phase in which we cannot say absolutely either that they are bald or that they are not: they are in process of becoming bald. The metaphysical “either-or” breaks down.
In all these examples we are confronted with the distinction between an objective process, in which something undergoes change, and the concepts in terms of which we try to sum up the characteristics of the things involved in the process. Such concepts never do and never can always and in all respects correspond to their objects, precisely because the objects are undergoing change. Thus Engels writes:
“Are the concepts that prevail in natural science fictions because they by no means always coincide with reality? From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change; on the day that concept and reality absolutely coincide in the organic world, development is at an end.”[36]
And he pointed out that similar considerations apply to all concepts without exception.
The Unity and Struggle of Opposites
When we think of the properties of things, their relationships, their modes of action and interaction, the processes into which they enter, then we find that, generally speaking, all these properties, relationships, interactions and processes divide into fundamental opposites.
For example, if we think of the simplest ways in which two bodies can act on one another, then we find that this action is either repulsion or attraction.
If we consider the electrical properties of bodies, then there is positive and negative electricity.
In organic life, there is the building up of organic compounds and the breaking down of them.
Again, in mathematics, there is addition and subtraction, plus and minus.
And in general, whatever sphere of inquiry we may be considering, we find that it involves such fundamental opposites. We find ourselves considering, not just a number of different things, different properties, different relations, different processes, but pairs of opposites, fundamental oppositions. As Hegel put it: “In opposition, the different is not confronted by any other, but by its other.”[37]
Thus if we think of the forces acting between two bodies, there are not just a number of different forces, but they divide into attractive and repulsive forces; if we think of electric charges, there are not just a number of different charges, but they divide into positive and negative; and so on. Attraction stands opposed to repulsion, positive electricity to negative electricity.
Such fundamental oppositions are not understood by the metaphysical way of thinking.
In the first place, the metaphysical way of thinking tries to ignore and discount opposition. It seeks to understand a given subject-matter simply in terms of a whole number of different properties and different relations of things, ignoring the fundamental oppositions which are manifested in these properties and relations. Thus those who think in metaphysical terms about class-divided societies, for example, try to understand society as consisting merely of a large number of different individuals connected together by all kinds of different social relations—but they ignore the fundamental opposition of exploiters and exploited, manifested in all those social relations.
In the second place, when the metaphysical way of thinking does nevertheless come upon the fundamental oppositions and cannot ignore them, then—true to its habit of thinking of each thing in isolation, as a fixed constant—it considers these opposites each in isolation from the other, understands them separately and as each excluding the other. Thus, for example, the older physicists used to think of positive and negative electricity just simply as two different “electrical fluids.”
But contrary to metaphysics, not only are fundamental opposites involved in every subject-matter, but these opposites mutually imply each other, are inseparably connected together, and, far from being exclusive, neither can exist or be understood except in relation to the other.
This characteristic of opposition is known as polarity: Fundamental opposites are polar opposites. A magnet, for example, has two poles, a north pole and a south pole. But these poles, opposite and distinct, cannot exist in separation. If the magnet is cut in two, there is not a north pole in one half and a south pole in the other, but north and south poles recur in each half. The north pole exists only as the opposite of the south, and vice versa; the one can be defined only as the opposite of the other.
In general, fundamental opposition has to be understood as polar opposition, and every subject-matter has to be understood in terms of the polar opposition involved in it.
Thus in physics we find that attraction and repulsion are involved in every physical process in such a way that they cannot be separated or isolated the one from the other. In considering living bodies, we do not find in some cases the building up of organic compounds and in other cases their breaking down, but every life process involves both the building up and the breaking down of organic compounds. In capitalist society the increasing socialization of labor is inseparable from its opposite, the increasing centralization of capital.
This unity of opposites—the fact that opposites cannot be understood in separation one from another, but only in their inseparable connection in every field of investigation—is strikingly exemplified in mathematics. Here the fundamental operations are the two opposites, addition and subtraction. And so far is it from being the case that addition and subtraction can be understood each apart from the other, that addition can be represented as subtraction and vice versa; thus the operation of subtraction (a — b) can be represented as an addition (— b + a). Similarly a division a/b can be represented as a multiplication a x (1/b).[38]
The unity of opposites, their inseparable connection, is by no means to be understood as a harmonious and stable relationship, as a state of equilibrium. On the contrary, “The unity of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.”[39]
The existence of fundamental polar oppositions, manifesting themselves in every department of nature and society, expresses itself in the conflict and struggle of opposed tendencies, which, despite phases of temporary equilibrium, lead to continual motion and development, to a perpetual coming into being and passing away of everything in existence, to sharp changes of state and transformations.
Thus, for example, the equilibrium of attractive and repulsive forces in the physical world is never more than conditional and temporary; the conflict and struggle of attraction and repulsion always asserts itself, issuing in physical changes and transformations, whether transformations on an atomic scale, chemical changes or, on a grand scale, in the explosion of stars.
Dialectics and Metaphysics
To sum up.
Metaphysics thinks in terms of “ready-made” things, whose properties and potentialities it seeks to fix and determine once and for all. It considers each thing by itself, in isolation from every other, in terms of irreconcilable antitheses—“either-or.” It contrasts one thing to another, one property to another, one relationship to another, not considering things in their real movement and interconnection, and not considering that every subject-matter represents a unity of opposites—opposed but inseparably connected together.
Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics refuses to think of things each by itself, as having a fixed nature and fixed properties—“either-or”—but it recognizes that things come into being, exist and cease to be, in a process of unending change and development, in a process of complicated and ever-changing interrelationship, in which each thing exists only in its connection with other things and goes through a series of transformations, and in which is always manifested the unity, inseparable interconnection and struggle of the opposite properties, aspects, tendencies characteristic of every phenomenon of nature and society.
Contrary to metaphysics, the aim of dialectics is to trace the real changes and interconnections in the world and to think of things always in their motion and interconnection.
Thus Engels writes:
“The world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes.... One no longer permits oneself to be imposed upon by the antitheses insuperable for the old metaphysics.”[40]
“The old rigid antitheses, the sharp impassable dividing lines are more and more disappearing.... The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions are in fact to be found in nature but only with relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absoluteness have been introduced into nature only by our minds—this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature.”[41]
“Dialectics... grasps things and their images, ideas, essentially in their inter-connection, in their sequence, their movement, their birth and death.”[42]
Lenin wrote that the understanding of the “contradictory parts” of every phenomenon was “the essence of dialectics.” It consists in “the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature, including mind and society.”[43]
Lastly, Marx wrote that: “dialectic... in its rational form is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”[44]
[32] Engels, Anti-Dühring, Preface.
[33] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Chapter IV.
[34] The positivists say we have no right to assert that anything exists except our own sense-perceptions. They say that to assert anything else is “metaphysics.”
[35] Engels, Anti-Dühring, Introduction.
[36] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Engels to Schmidt, March 12, 1895, N. Y., 1942.
[37] Hegel, Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences: Logic, Section 119.
[38] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Chapter 7, “Note on Mathematics.”
[39] Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 11, “On Dialectics.”
[40] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Chapter IV.
[41] Anti-Dühring, Preface.
[42] Ibid., Introduction.
[43] Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 11, “On Dialectics.”
[44] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Preface to second edition, N. Y., 1947.
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