Marx and Dialectical Materialism
However, this disagreement is actually based on a misunderstanding of Marx's philosophical thought. Marx has dialectical materialism as a worldview, but this is a philosophical thought with distinct characteristics and important differences from Engels's, which is what we usually call dialectical materialism. Denying that Marx has dialectical materialism and equating it with what we usually call dialectical materialism are both one-sided and unrealistic.
1. Marx’s Dialectical Materialism
In the academic world, some people use dialectical materialism to refer to the entire Marxist philosophy. According to its manifestations in different fields, it can be specifically divided into dialectical materialism's view of nature, history, and thinking. Some people also put it on a par with historical materialism, believing that Marxist philosophy is dialectical materialism and historical materialism, and that dialectical materialism is in fact just a materialistic and dialectical view of nature. In my country's philosophical community, the vast majority of people hold the latter view. According to the latter understanding, dialectical materialism is a worldview that explains everything with the dialectical movement of natural matter. This understanding is the basis for this article's discussion. It should be acknowledged that such a worldview existed in Marx.
Let's first look at materialist thought. Engels and Lenin used material existence outside of man to explain man himself, his consciousness, and the entire world. In Marx's works, we can't find a clear discussion of this thought, but after careful analysis, we will find that he had such a thought.
A strong evidence is Anti-Dühring, a book in which Engels expounded his materialist thought. In the preface to the book, Engels said: The world view expounded in this book was mostly established and expounded by Marx, and only a very small part belongs to me. Therefore, it is self-evident between us that my book could not have been completed without his understanding. Before printing, I read the entire manuscript to him, and the tenth chapter of the economics section (the discussion of the History of Criticism) was written by Marx. It was only due to external reasons that I had to shorten it a little. It has long been our habit to help each other in various professions. Some scholars have suggested that Marx did what Engels said here against his will because of his face. This assumption is not valid. Marx is by no means the kind of person who does not adhere to principles or even obeys the calculation of interests.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels criticized Feuerbach for not understanding the importance of practice and pointed out that people's continuous labor production activities are the basis of the entire existing sensory world. If this activity is interrupted for even one year, the entire human world, including Feuerbach himself, will soon cease to exist. Then he said: "Of course, in this case, the priority of external nature will still be maintained, and this point is of course not applicable to primitive people who are produced by natural means." This shows that he believes that the external nature exists independently of and before human practical activities, and that humans themselves are the product of the development of the movement of nature. What is highlighted here is the objective reality of matter and its significance as the origin of the world.
In The Holy Family, Marx criticized Bauer in this way: Criticism is the weapon in his hand, with which he turns everything that claims to be a finite material existence outside of infinite self-consciousness into a mere illusion and pure thought. In the entity, he refuted not the metaphysical illusion, but the secular core - nature. He attacked nature that exists outside of man, and also attacked man himself as a natural being. Obviously, in Marx's view, nature is an objective existence outside of man, and man himself is also a natural being. This is exactly the view of natural materialism promoted by Engels and Lenin. When criticizing Proudhon, Marx also said: "Man did not create matter itself. Even man's ability to create this or that kind of production of matter can only be carried out under the condition that matter itself pre-exists."
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx said: The theory of the creation of the earth has been dealt a fatal blow by geotectonics, which is the science that explains the formation and generation of the earth as a process and a self-generation. Spontaneous generation is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation. "Spontaneous generation" and "creationism" are two theories about the origin of life. The former believes that life is the product of material movement, and the latter believes that life is the creation of God. This passage is talking about the materialistic worldview, and explains life with the material existence of nature.
Marx's natural materialism is also reflected in his discussion of Feuerbach's philosophy. In March 1843, after reading Feuerbach's newly published "Provisional Outlines for the Reform of Philosophy", Marx wrote to Ruge: "There is only one thing that does not satisfy me about Feuerbach's aphorisms, that is, he emphasizes nature too much and politics too little." Feuerbach clearly put forward and emphasized his natural materialist worldview in "Provisional Outlines for the Reform of Philosophy". Obviously, Marx agreed with this worldview.
Going back further, we can trace it back to Marx's "Doctoral Dissertation" in early 1841. The title of the dissertation is "The Difference between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and the Natural Philosophy of Epicurus", and the two philosophers discussed are ancient Greek materialists and atomists. The article did not make any criticisms of their materialistic views, but on the contrary discussed the issues based on their materialistic worldview. Marx criticized Democritus' atomic theory, not his materialism, but his materialistic mechanical determinism, criticizing him for not seeing that the material atoms are actually human subjective initiative.
It is no accident that Marx holds the concept of natural materialism as the origin of the world. This can be explained from two aspects. First, Marx inherited Hegel's view that Kant's philosophy is actually the entire German classical philosophy, "the German theory of the French Revolution". We know that in France, the philosophy that adapts to the needs of social revolution is mainly 18th century French materialism, which is a worldview that promotes scientific rationality and explains everything with the movement of matter. Marx and Engels pointed out that due to the weakness of the German bourgeoisie, Kant could not raise the banner of materialism, but proposed the concept of the thing-in-itself and established the philosophy of dualism, which can be said to be a concession to materialism and a shy materialism.
In Hegel's objective idealism philosophy, nature is the externalization of absolute spirit. In terms of the origin of matter from spirit, it is a typical idealist theory, but the resulting nature is not only an objective existence that is not subject to human will, but also the source of the entire world including humans. Such an understanding is full of materialistic spirit, and in fact, there is not much difference from materialism in daily life. Lenin has repeatedly pointed out that there are materialistic elements in the depths of Hegel's philosophy. When talking about his "Logic", he even said: "In Hegel's most idealistic work, idealism is the least and materialism is the most. 'Contradiction', but it is a fact!".
Materialist Feuerbach is just the logical result of the historical development of German classical philosophy. Second, since the 1830s, a trend of vulgar materialism or mechanical materialism has begun to prevail in Germany. In this regard, philosophers Jin Xiping and Wu Zengding said: Hegel's death (November 4, 1831 - the author of this article) seemed to suddenly wake up German natural scientists who were blinded by speculation from their dreams. They abandoned Hegel's corpse and learned from the British to devote themselves to experimental research in natural sciences. Since then, Germany's natural science and technology have gradually caught up with their counterparts in Britain and France. The brilliant achievements it has achieved have gradually made German cultural people regard natural science as a model of truth. The status of philosophy itself has plummeted. Natural science has gradually become a philosophical worldview. Schools such as mechanical materialism and vulgar materialism are typical manifestations of the gradual transformation of natural science into a philosophical worldview.
Other philosophies that do not belong to the natural science school are also more or less influenced by natural science, the model of truth. Everyone scrambled to show off the scientific nature of their own doctrines. That is to say, after the 1830s, mechanical materialism and vulgar materialism emerged in Germany, and the influence of natural science penetrated into all academic fields. The representatives of this scientific materialism were mainly Vogt, Moleschott and Büchner, who jointly advocated: "(1) Recognize the existence of an objective world independent of man; (2) Man is a material entity like other beings in nature; (3) Man's spirit or soul cannot exist independently of his body; (4) There is no non-material entity, and there is no God." For the above reasons, in the early 1840s, although no German intellectuals could explain social history materialistically, it was not surprising that they held a materialistic view on nature. This was exactly what Marx did at the time. Existing materials cannot restore the details of how Marx accepted the materialist viewpoint, but it should be safe to say that his view of nature during his university years was in fact materialistic in nature, otherwise he would not have chosen the atomic theory of materialists Democritus and Epicurus as the research subject of his doctoral thesis.
Those who deny that Marx had the same materialist ideas as Engels often emphasize that Marx was only concerned with humanized nature, and they find a lot of arguments in Marx's works as evidence. It is true that Marx was mainly interested in humanized nature within the scope of human labor practice, which is true, but Marx also acknowledged the existence of material nature before, after, and outside the scope of human practice, which is also undeniable.
Let’s look at dialectical thought again.
The dialectics we usually understand comes from Engels's summary and conclusion of the relevant ideas in Hegel's works. It is a universal law applicable to the whole world, namely the law of the unity of opposites, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and the law of the negation of the negation. Marx had all the ideas related to them.
Marx said in The Poverty of Philosophy: The coexistence, struggle and fusion of two contradictory aspects into a new category is dialectical movement. In The Chinese Revolution and the European Revolution, he also said: There is a very profound but bizarre speculative philosopher who studies the principles of human development. He often praises what he calls the law of the connection between the two poles as one of the basic mysteries of nature. In his view, the simple proverb "the connection between the two poles" is a great and immutable truth applicable to all aspects of life. It is a theorem that philosophers cannot do without, just as astronomers cannot do without Kepler's laws or Newton's great discoveries. What is mentioned here is the universal law of the unity of opposites.
In a letter to Marx on June 16, 1867, Engels mentioned Hoffmann's General Theory of Modern Chemistry, which proposed that molecules are the smallest parts of matter that can exist independently, and that there are indivisible atoms. Engels believed that matter is infinitely divisible, and molecules are just "a joint in an infinite series of divisions." Obviously, the issue discussed here is the dialectical materialism of nature. Marx replied to confirm Engels's ideas and talked about the law of the transformation of quality into quantity. He said: Your view of Hoffmann is completely correct. In addition, you can see from the end of the third chapter where I describe the transformation of a handicraftsman into a capitalist due to simple quantitative change that I cited the law of the transformation of simple quantitative change into qualitative change discovered by Hegel in the text, and regarded it as a law that is equally valid in history and natural science. In a note in the text (I happened to have listened to Hoffmann's lecture at that time) I mentioned the molecular theory,...
Marx also discussed the law of negation of negation. Capital states that the capitalist mode of appropriation, and thus capitalist private ownership, arising from the capitalist mode of production, is the first negation of individual private ownership based on one's own labor. However, capitalist production, due to the inevitability of the natural process, has caused its own negation. This is the negation of negation. This negation is not the re-establishment of private ownership, but the re-establishment of individual ownership on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era, that is, on the basis of cooperation and the common possession of land and means of production produced by labor itself.
It can be seen that the materialistic and dialectical ideas that we usually understand can be found in Marx. Not only that, he also has a worldview that uses the dialectical movement of matter to explain the world. The words we quoted earlier - "The theory of earth creation has suffered a fatal blow from geotectonic, which explains that the formation and generation of the earth is a process and a self-generated science. The theory of spontaneous generation is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation" - is an explanation of the entire natural world, including life phenomena, using the self-movement of matter. According to his understanding, man is "a real, physical being who stands on a solid, oval earth and exhales and inhales all natural forces", that is, a material being, and human society and its history, and man himself, are the products of man's self-creation and self-formation:
"The whole so-called world history is nothing more than the process of man's birth through man's labor, the process of nature's generation for man, so he has intuitive and irrefutable proof of his birth through himself and his formation process."
Before these two paragraphs, Marx also said:
"Any being only considers itself independent when it stands on its own two feet, and it only stands on its own two feet when it exists on its own. ... Creation is a concept that is difficult to eliminate from people's consciousness. The existence of nature and man through itself is incomprehensible to people's consciousness, because this existence contradicts all the obvious facts of real life."
The previous discussion on the origin of the earth and life is a concrete example of the existence of matter relying on itself. Although the expression is not clear enough, behind the immature expression, Marx's view of the world is still very clear. However, isn't this view a worldview that explains everything by the self-movement of matter? As for how matter moves itself, from Marx's discussion of dialectics cited above, these movements reflect what we call the basic laws of materialist dialectics.
Many of Marx's statements make people feel that there is indeed a dialectical materialist worldview behind them. Although it is vague, it does exist. Only in this way can we understand why Engels's work "Anti-Dühring", which systematically expounds his materialist dialectical worldview, was affirmed by Marx. However, in Marx's works, we cannot find a clear and complete exposition of this worldview like Engels. Why? The main reason is that Engels once engaged in a long-term study of natural dialectics based on the need to criticize metaphysical materialism, and formed a complete dialectical materialist worldview based on the new achievements of natural science. The debate with Dühring gave him the opportunity and necessity to make a relatively systematic exposition of it. However, Marx was only concerned with various issues directly related to human liberation. After revealing the laws of social and historical development (in Marx's view, it was the historical development of man), he focused his main energy on political economy and socialist issues that were more directly related to social development. As a worldview, the materialist view of nature could not be paid attention to, let alone systematically expounded.
II. Characteristics of Marx's Dialectical Materialism
However, it must be emphasized that Marx's dialectical materialist world outlook has distinct characteristics compared with what we usually call dialectical materialism, in short, compared with Engels' dialectical materialism. The best way to illustrate this point is to compare the two dialectical materialist ideas. In terms of commonalities, they both adhere to materialism and dialectics, and both use the dialectical movement of matter to explain the world. The main differences are as follows:
First, Engels' dialectical materialism highlights the significance of world outlook, aiming to explain the essence of the entire world and reveal its general laws, while Marx is mainly concerned with the methodological significance of dialectics. Engels attached great importance to the origin of the world and proposed: "The major and fundamental problem of all philosophy, especially modern philosophy, is the relationship between thinking and existence." He also said that the relationship between thinking and existence, and spirit and nature, is the highest problem of all philosophy. Regarding dialectics, he clearly stated: "Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the universal laws of the movement and development of nature, human society and thinking." He pointed out in "Dialectics of Nature":
"In this book, dialectics is regarded as the science of the most universal laws of all movements. That is to say, the laws of dialectics must be equally applicable to the movement in nature and human history, or to the movement of thinking."
In contrast, in Marx we do not find any discussion on the origin of the entire world, nor do we find any discussion on dialectics as the general law of the world. The materialist dialectical worldview exists in Marx, but what he values is materialist dialectics as a methodology, and we can find many relevant discussions in him. He said: My method of exposition is different from Hegel's, because I am a materialist and Hegel is an idealist. Hegel's dialectics is the basic form of all dialectics, but this is only the case after stripping away its mystical form, and this is precisely the characteristic of my method. He also clearly pointed out: Nearly 30 years ago, when Hegel's dialectics was still popular, I criticized the mystical aspects of Hegel's dialectics. But when I wrote the first volume of "Capital", the resentful, conceited, and mediocre imitators who are giving orders in the German intellectual circles today were happy to treat Hegel like the bold Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, that is, as a "dead dog". Therefore, I openly admit that I am a student of this great thinker, and in some places in the chapter on the theory of value, I even show off Hegel's unique way of expression. Dialectics was mystified in Hegel's hands, but this did not prevent him from being the first to fully and consciously describe the general form of movement of dialectics. This is Marx's explanation of the origin of his dialectical thought theory in general - it comes from the materialist inheritance and transformation of Hegel's dialectical thought, and is a method of theoretical research. What are the characteristics of Hegel's and Marx's dialectical method?
Marx believed that it is to reproduce the living movement and development process of things from the perspective of ideas. He said: Research must fully grasp the material, analyze its various forms of development, and explore the internal connection between these forms. Only after this work is completed can the real movement be properly described. Once this is done, once the life of the material is reflected in the concept, it will appear to us as a priori structure. My dialectical method is fundamentally different from Hegel's dialectical method, and it is completely opposite to it. In Hegel's view, the thought process, which he called the idea and even transformed it into an independent subject, is the creator of real things, and real things are only the external manifestation of the thought process. My view is the opposite. The idea is nothing more than material things that have been transferred into the human mind and transformed in the human mind.
In short, Marx's dialectical method is to reproduce the living process of movement and development of things in the form of ideas.
What he wanted to reveal and reproduce was not the universal laws of the material world, but the special laws of concrete things. In 1872, when the Russian version of Capital was published, a Russian critic wrote: "Some people would say that the general laws of economic life are the same whether they apply to the present or the past. This is exactly what Marx denied. In his opinion, such abstract laws do not exist... According to him, on the contrary, each historical period has its own laws... Once life has passed a certain period of development and entered another stage from one stage, it begins to be governed by other laws... Marx set himself the goal of studying and explaining the capitalist economic system from this point of view. In this way, he simply expressed in an extremely scientific way the goal that any accurate study of economic life must have... The scientific value of this study lies in clarifying the special laws that govern the birth, survival, development and death of a certain social organism and its replacement by another higher organism."
Marx highly praised the above comments: This author describes what he calls my practical method so accurately, and has such a favorable impression when talking about my personal application of this method. Isn’t what he describes the dialectical method?
It can be seen that Marx's dialectical thought does not focus on the general laws of material movement, but focuses on the historical development of specific things and the specific laws reflected in their development. He is more concerned with the laws of development of a specific thing, such as capitalist society or human beings. The purpose of caring about these laws is not to construct a worldview, but to clarify the special laws of the birth, survival, development and death of this specific thing and its replacement by another higher organism, that is, to make a reasonable explanation of the characteristics, origin and destination of this specific thing.
In the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", Marx said that the greatness of Hegel's "Phenomenology" and its final result - dialectics - lies first in:
"Hegel regards the generation of man as a process, objectification as de-objectification, as externalization and the transcendence of this externalization; it can be seen that he grasped the essence of labor and understood objective man, real and therefore true man as the result of his own labor."
This also shows that when Marx studied dialectics, his main focus was not on the world outlook, but on the specific laws of the generation and development of a certain thing.
Second, the two dialectical materialist ideas have different understandings of matter. The dialectical materialism we usually talk about mainly comes from Engels and Lenin, emphasizing the objective reality of matter. As mentioned earlier, Engels attached great importance to the origin of the world and believed that everything in the world, including life, can be explained by matter. For example, he pointed out: "Life is the way of existence of protein bodies, and this way is essentially the continuous self-renewal of the chemical composition of these protein bodies." "If you ask further: What exactly are thinking and consciousness, and where do they come from, then you will find that they are all products of the human brain, and humans themselves are products of nature, and they develop in their own environment and with this environment; it goes without saying here that in the final analysis, they are also products of the human brain, which is a product of nature, and they are not contradictory to other connections in nature, but are adapted to it."
Regarding the concept of matter, Lenin said: Matter is a philosophical category that marks objective reality. This objective reality is perceived by people through their senses. It exists independently of our senses and is copied, photographed, and reflected by our senses. He clearly stated: "The only 'characteristic' of matter is that it is objective reality and exists outside of our consciousness. Philosophical materialism is inseparable from the recognition of this characteristic."
This is Marx's systematic analysis and evaluation of modern materialist thought. He emphasized the dynamic nature of matter - note that it is not human, but material. "Among the inherent properties of matter, movement is the first and most important property - the movement mentioned here is not only mechanical and mathematical movement, but also tendency, vitality, tension, or in the words of Jacob Boehme, the pain of matter." That is to say, Marx believed that movement is the first property of matter, but the movement mentioned here is not only the change of quantity and position, but also "tendency, vitality, tension, pain", which is the activity of changing the surrounding things to make oneself manifest. In organisms, it is its life activity, and in humans, it is practical activity. In Marx's view, not only humans have dynamic nature, but all matter has the impulse and demand to change other things through "practical" activities to realize itself, that is, the so-called tendency, vitality, tension, and they have dynamic nature like humans. Because of this, when Hobbes announced that materialism is to explain everything with mechanical movement or mathematical movement, Marx criticized "materialism has become indifferent to people." Because in Marx's materialist thought, matter has "desire", and its movement cannot be attributed to the influence of external factors and cold logic. In this respect, it is similar to humans.
We can also see in Marx's discussion that he believed that idealism was also hostile to people, because it advocated "spirits without flesh and blood" and absolutized the spirit of flesh and blood people into an existence that was separated from people and determined everything. The body and the spirit are both attributes of people. Materialism that one-sidedly emphasizes the physicality and materiality of people and idealism that one-sidedly emphasizes the spirituality of people are both "hostile to people" and inhuman. This is a vivid manifestation of Marx's view of matter.
Bauer is a typical subjective idealist. Marx criticized him in this way: Criticism is the weapon in his hand. With this weapon, he turned everything that still claims to be a finite material existence outside of infinite self-consciousness into a mere illusion and pure thought. In the entity, he refuted not the metaphysical illusion, but the secular core - nature. He attacked nature that existed outside of man, and also attacked man himself as a natural being. Not assuming the existence of entity in any field (he actually said such a thing) is equivalent to not recognizing any existence different from thinking, any natural force different from the spontaneity of spirit, any essential power different from the rational person, any pain different from activity, any influence of others on us different from our own actions, any feeling and desire different from knowledge, any mind different from the head, any object different from the subject, any practice different from theory, any person different from the critic, any commonality of reality different from the abstract universality, any you different from me. We can see that Marx clearly affirmed that matter, that is, nature, exists outside of human consciousness, and that humans are also natural beings, that is, he recognized the objective reality of matter and its primacy relative to consciousness; at the same time, he emphasized that material entities are objects, existences outside of thought, with spontaneous natural forces, forces similar to human essential forces but different from reason, and with pains different from human activities, and feelings and desires different from knowledge. Here, he is still saying that all matter has pains and desires similar to human essential forces, and has the "practical" impulse to act on other things.
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 was written a few months before The Holy Family. In it, Marx said: Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being, and as a living natural being, man has natural forces and vitality, and is an active natural being; these forces exist in man as talents and abilities, as desires; ... It can be seen that natural forces, vitality, and activity are common to all natural beings, but they are manifested in man as talents, abilities, and desires. In other words, the desires, talents, and abilities possessed by man are the special and most prominent manifestations of the natural forces, vitality, and activity inherent in all natural beings. He also said: "The sun is the object of plants, the object that plants cannot do without and confirms their life, just as plants are the objects of the sun, the manifestation of the sun's power to awaken life, and the manifestation of the sun's objective essential power." Here, the anthropomorphic expression method is used. The sun has the power to awaken life, and the plants have the help of the sun to confirm their own life.
The work that most concentratedly reflects Marx's material thought is his doctoral thesis, namely, "The Difference between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and that of Epicurus" (prepared in early 1839 and completed in March 1841). Democritus and Epicurus were ancient Greek materialist philosophers. Both were atomists. The difference was that Epicurus believed that atoms had three kinds of motion in the void. One kind of motion was a straight-line fall; another kind of motion was caused by the atoms deviating from the straight line; and the third kind of motion was caused by the mutual repulsion of many atoms. He admitted that the first and third kinds of motion were common to Democritus and Epicurus; however, the fact that atoms deviated from the straight line distinguished Epicurus from Democritus.
Marx's position clearly leans towards Epicurus. He regards Epicurus as "the greatest Greek Enlightenment thinker" and points out that "the principle of Epicurus' philosophy... is the absoluteness and freedom of self-consciousness, although this self-consciousness is only understood in the form of individuality." Epicurus did not deny the materiality of atoms, but: Epicurus expressed the materiality of atoms with the straight-line motion of atoms, and realized the formal determination of atoms with the deviation from the straight line, and these opposing determinations were regarded as directly opposing movements. Therefore, Lucretius correctly asserted that the deviation broke the "shackles of fate", and just as he immediately applied this idea to consciousness, the same can be said about atoms, that the deviation is something in their chest that can fight and resist. The straight-line motion shows that atoms are material, and the deviation shows that atoms as materials, like humans, have the will, impulse or desire to fight against fate and necessity in their "chest". The deviation "expresses the true soul of the atom". The will, impulse and desire of the atom are very important, and they are the driving force of material movement and evolution. Marx said: If atoms were not constantly deflected, there would be no impacts, no collisions of atoms, and the world would never have been created. He also said: Just as atoms break away from the straight line, deviate from the straight line, and thus free themselves from their relative existence, that is, from the straight line, so the whole Epicurean philosophy breaks away from limited existence wherever the abstract concept of individuality, that is, independence and negation of all relations with others, should be expressed in its existence. Therefore, the purpose of action is to break away from, to leave pain and confusion, that is, to gain peace of mind. Therefore, good is to escape from evil, and happiness is to escape from pain. Finally, where abstract individuality is manifested in its highest freedom and independence, in its totality, the existence that is freed there is logically the whole existence, and therefore the gods also avoid the world, are indifferent to it, and live outside of it.
Through the above interpretation of Epicurus' atomic thought, Marx expressed his own understanding of matter: the world is material, but matter has free "will", and its chest is surging with desires and impulses that are in conflict with objective necessity, and the resulting movement constitutes the entire material world. The self-movement of matter can explain everything, and there is no place for God in this world.
This also reflects the idea that all matter has pain and desire similar to the essential power of human beings, and has the "practical" impulse to act on other things. In addition, this also shows a worldview that explains the world with the dialectical movement of matter.
Third, the theory of dialectical materialism, which we often talk about, emphasizes the objectivity of the world and the inevitability of the movement and development of the objective world, and emphasizes that people must obey this inevitability. Marx is different from this. He emphasizes people and their initiative. This is the most important difference between the two dialectical materialist worldviews.
Engels' dialectical materialism explains everything with matter, including man and his consciousness, and emphasizes the decisive role of matter on consciousness. In a word, look at man from the perspective of matter. Although Marx recognized the materiality of the world, he focused on the issue of human liberation and looked at things from the perspective of man, focusing mainly on the humanized nature of man's practical activities. For example, he said:
"The natural world generated in human history, that is, in the process of the formation of human society, is the real nature of man."
This difference is fully reflected in the concept of freedom. People often quote Engels' words: Hegel was the first to correctly describe the relationship between freedom and necessity. In his view, freedom is the understanding of necessity. "Necessity is blind only when it is not understood." Freedom does not lie in the fantasy of being independent from natural laws, but in the understanding of these laws, so that the natural laws can be planned to serve certain purposes. ... Freedom of will is only the ability to make decisions with the help of the understanding of things. Therefore, the freer a person's judgment on a certain issue is, the greater the necessity of the content of this judgment; while indecision is based on ignorance, it seems to be an arbitrary choice among many different and contradictory possible decisions, but it is precisely this that proves that it is not free, that it is dominated by the object that it should be dominated. Therefore, freedom lies in controlling ourselves and external nature based on the understanding of the necessity of nature; ... Freedom is the understanding of necessity, which is the basic conclusion of the dialectical materialist worldview that we are familiar with. It looks at people from the perspective of things, highlighting the objectivity and necessity of the material world and their constraints and determination on people.
Marx's dialectical materialism is completely different from this. It does not deny the objectivity of the external material world and the inevitability of its laws of motion, but its starting point is not things, but people. It emphasizes not the constraints of objective necessity on people, but the initiative of people, and how people can use these laws to break through their restrictions on people.
In terms of freedom, Marx believed that freedom is the essential characteristic of human beings, and the essence of freedom is that people transform the world according to their own standards and needs. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 stated that the overall characteristics of a species, the species, characteristics of a species, lie in the nature of life activities, and free and conscious activities are precisely the species characteristics of human beings.
The freedom mentioned here is not the recognition and obedience to necessity, but the embodiment of the initiative and even "arbitrariness" of human consciousness: animals are directly identical with their own life activities. Animals do not distinguish themselves from their own life activities. They are their own life activities. Humans make their own life activities themselves the object of their will and their own consciousness. They have conscious life activities. This is not the kind of stipulation that humans are directly integrated with. Conscious life activities directly distinguish humans from the life activities of animals. It is precisely because of this that humans are species beings. In other words, it is precisely because humans are species beings that they are conscious beings, that is, their own life is an object for them. Only because of this, their activities are free activities. ... Marx is emphasizing that the life activities of animals are unconscious and instinctive, and therefore there is no freedom at all; human life activities are conscious, and humans know what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing it. That is to say, their life activities are consciously and actively planned and initiated by them, and they can recognize their own life activities as objects. Only because human life activities are the objects of his consciousness, and are consciously and actively planned and initiated by him, can human activities be free. Human life activities are labor, and human freedom is embodied in labor. Why is human labor free? Marx compared it with the life activities of animals, or production: through practice, creating the objective world and transforming the inorganic world, man proves himself to be a conscious class being, that is, a being who regards the class as his essence, or himself as a class being. It is true that animals also produce.
They build nests or dwellings for themselves, such as bees, beavers, ants, etc. However, animals only produce what they or their cubs need directly; animal production is one-sided, while human production is comprehensive; animals only produce under the control of direct physical needs, while humans produce even without the influence of physical needs, and only when they are not influenced by such needs can they truly produce; animals only produce themselves, while humans produce the entire natural world; the products of animals belong directly to their bodies, while humans face their products freely. Animals only construct according to the scale and needs of the species to which they belong, while humans know how to produce according to the scale of any species, and know how to apply the internal scale to objects everywhere; therefore, humans also construct according to the laws of beauty. Marx regarded production that is not determined by physical needs as "real production". Such production has nothing to do with objective needs, is determined by human will, and is free. Humans can produce according to the scale of any species and can "construct according to the laws of aesthetic". It is well known that aesthetic is a subjective experience. Humans can produce according to their own subjective aesthetic needs, get rid of all external restrictions, and of course are free.
In the “Critique of Political Economy (1857-1858 Manuscripts)”, Marx also discussed the freedom of people embodied in labor: Adam Smith regarded labor as a curse. In his view, “ease” is an appropriate state, equivalent to “freedom” and “happiness”. It is completely incomprehensible to Smith that a person “under normal health, physical strength, spirit, skills, and techniques” also has the need to engage in normal labor and stop being at ease. It is true that the labor standard itself is provided by the outside, by the purpose that must be achieved and the obstacles that must be overcome by labor to achieve this purpose. However, overcoming this obstacle itself is the realization of freedom, and further, the external purpose loses the appearance of a purely external natural necessity and is regarded as a purpose proposed by the individual himself, and is therefore regarded as self-realization, the objectification of the subject, that is, real freedom - and this freedom is precisely labor when it is seen in activities.
This passage shows Marx's view of freedom from another perspective. Human labor is the transformation of the material world. Objective material existence is an obstacle to the laborer's achievement of his goal. Marx said, "Overcoming this obstacle itself is the realization of freedom." Marx further said that the goal of labor is external and has the "appearance of pure external natural necessity." That is to say, whether this goal can be achieved depends on external material conditions and external nature. But in labor, it is consciously established and proposed by the laborer. Therefore, labor activities are manifested as people's "self-realization and objectification of the subject," which is "real freedom." The spirit embodied in these two meanings is consistent, that is, the so-called freedom, "real freedom," is people's active overcoming of material limitations in order to "self-realization and objectification of the subject."
Using the laws of the objective material world to transcend its constraints on people is the basic content of Marx's communist thought. "Capital" says: The kingdom of freedom only begins where the labor required by necessity and external purpose ends; therefore, according to the nature of things, it exists on the other side of the real material production field. Just as the savage must fight with nature to meet his needs and to maintain and reproduce his life, the civilized man must do so; and he must do so in all social forms and in all possible modes of production. This kingdom of natural necessity will expand with the development of man, because needs will expand; however, the productivity to meet such needs will also expand at the same time. Freedom in this field can only be: socialized people, united producers, will rationally regulate the material transformation between them and nature, put it under their common control, and not let it rule themselves as a blind force; carry out this material transformation by consuming the least power and under the conditions that are most worthy of and most suitable for their human nature. However, this field is always a kingdom of necessity. On the other side of this kingdom of necessity, the development of human ability as an end in itself, the real kingdom of freedom, begins. However, this kingdom of freedom can only flourish if it is built on the basis of the kingdom of necessity. The shortening of the working day is the fundamental condition. The German Ideology has a vivid description of the kingdom of freedom mentioned here: In communist society, no one has a special scope of activity, but can develop in any department. Society regulates the entire production, thus making it possible for us to do this today and that tomorrow according to our own interests, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, engaging in animal husbandry in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. This will not make me always a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
It can be seen that the freedom in Marx's mind is based on the recognition and utilization of necessity (note, not obedience). Of course, hunting, fishing, and animal husbandry all have objective laws that people must obey, but obeying them is to do what they freely decide to do "according to their own interests" and serves human freedom.
Because of his emphasis on the dynamic nature of matter, Marx firmly opposed the objective necessity of mechanical determinism. When discussing the difference between Democritus and Epicurus, he first pointed out that "in Democritus's view, necessity is fate, law, providence, and the creator of the world", and then quoted Epicurus' words: Necessity, which some people regard as the master of all things, does not exist. It is better to say that some things are accidental and others depend on our arbitrariness. Necessity cannot be persuaded, on the contrary, chance is unstable. Therefore, it is better to believe in myths about gods than to be a slave to fate as described by rationalists, because myths still leave a little hope, that is, worshipping gods will be blessed by gods, while fate is an iron-faced and impartial necessity.
Marx obviously agreed with Epicurus's ideas. This is the promotion of subjectivity: "Real possibility seeks to prove the necessity and reality of its object; while abstract possibility involves not the object to be explained, but the subject that explains." "The Doctoral Dissertation" is not a work of mature Marx, but the above ideas are what Marx insisted on throughout his life. As we all know, the first point of the famous "Theses on Feuerbach" fiercely criticized the old materialism that did not understand practice and viewed the world only from the material perspective instead of the subjective aspect. This idea of the "Doctoral Dissertation" is reflected in it.
Fourth, in connection with the emphasis on the objective necessity of the material world, in what is commonly called dialectical materialism, dialectics is manifested as the general law of material movement, specifically, the three major laws of unity of opposites, transformation of quality into quantity, and negation of negation, and several categories. Marx did not deny the existence of these laws, but he paid more attention to describing the self-movement of material existence due to its interaction. In short, the former attaches importance to dialectics as a law, while the latter attaches importance to dialectics as the process of self-movement of things.
As mentioned earlier, Marx once said in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:
"Any being considers itself independent only when it stands on its own two feet, and it stands on its own two feet only when it exists on its own. People who live by the grace of others regard themselves as a subordinate being. But if I not only rely on others to maintain my life, but others also create my life and are the source of my life, then I live entirely on the grace of others; if my life is not my own creation, then my life must have such a source outside of myself."
He intended to emphasize that any being is moving by itself. If one cannot see this self-movement, one must look for the source of movement outside of things and move towards theism. Because he focused on the self-movement of things, Marx emphasized that everything should be viewed from a historical perspective. This is an important feature of his dialectical thought.
Since tension, pain, desire, or activity, are inherent properties of matter, any matter is always in interaction and the resulting self-movement, and history becomes the essential characteristic of all matter, and the only basis for understanding its past, understanding its present, and even speculating on its future. Marx attached great importance to history. In his "Doctoral Dissertation", he said: In Hegel's view, "science is not something ready-made, but something that is being generated"; in "The German Ideology", he said: "We know only one science, namely, the science of history." History is the basic principle and basic angle for Marx to understand everything.
Because of his emphasis on historicity, wherever others see things, Marx always sees the process and history, and strives to find the law of development from history, understand the present through history, and understand the things in front of him. Since modern times, man has been the focus of countless thinkers, who unanimously believe that man has an unchanging essence that distinguishes him from animals, namely, human nature. Only Marx proposed: "The whole history is nothing more than the continuous change of human nature." Wanting to change reality for the future is the pursuit of many people. Marx's characteristic is that he regards things as a continuous development process and its future as the continuation of its history. Therefore, he attaches great importance to and respects its historical laws and opposes all forms of subjective idealism. As early as 1837, he said in a letter to his father that when he was distressed by the contradiction between what should be and what is in legal research due to his adherence to Fichte's subjective idealism, he found that: "We must carefully study the object itself from the development of the object, and never allow arbitrary division; the rationality of the thing itself should be unfolded as a self-contradictory thing here, and seek its own unity in itself." For this reason, he devoted himself to the study of Hegel's philosophy.
In addition, because he focused on the self-movement of things, Marx paid special attention to the mutual relationship between things. The so-called mutual relationship refers to the interaction and mutual change between things. Any thing has the ability to move, and it inherently requires to act on other things around it; conversely, other things also have the ability to move, so it is always in the action of other things on it, that is, in the mutual relationship with other things. The logical conclusion is that the state of existence of a thing is determined by its relationship with the surrounding things. Only by placing it in a certain relationship can we correctly understand it. It is a product of the environment. Since it changes the surrounding things, that is, its own environment, it is ultimately the product of the mutual relationship between it and the surrounding things.
This is Marx's basic view. When Marx stepped onto the German ideological stage, he was not the only one who was committed to seeking the path of human liberation. His difference was that on the one hand, he emphasized the historicity of human beings, and on the other hand, he was the only one who understood human beings in certain relationships, mainly social relationships. In Hegel's view, human beings are ideas and spirits; in the Young Hegelians, human beings are self-consciousness. Feuerbach saw the material and physical human beings and proposed that religion is the alienation of human nature. However, he understood that the essence of human beings is eternal and unchanging, which is reason, will, and love. As for why human nature is alienated, he did not know. Marx criticized him for not knowing that "the essence of human beings is not an abstract thing inherent in a single individual, but in its reality, it is the sum of all social relations." Hess went a step further than Feuerbach and realized that the alienation of human nature is due to the existence of private property. However, he did not raise such a question at all, so like Feuerbach, he turned to the "panacea" - love of humanity to overcome alienation.
How did Marx surpass these people? In The German Ideology, he said: Since Feuerbach revealed that the religious world is an illusion of the secular world (the secular world is still just a few words in Feuerbach's view), a question that Feuerbach did not answer naturally arose in front of German theory: How do people "stuff these illusions into their own heads"? This question even opened the way for German theorists to the materialistic worldview. This is actually Marx's summary of his own ideological transformation process. He agreed with the views of Feuerbach and Hess, but he also surpassed Feuerbach and Hess. Compared with them, his brilliance lies in his efforts to pursue the causes of the alienation of human nature, and along this line of thought, he further realized that the cause lies in society and social relations. At the beginning of 1843, he said: Man is not an abstract being that lives outside the world, man is the world of man, the state, and society. This society has produced religion, an inverted world consciousness, because they are the inverted world. Then he further said: German theory starts from the resolute and active abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ultimately boils down to the doctrine that man is the highest essence of man, and thus also to the absolute command: all relations that make man an insulted, enslaved, abandoned and despised object must be overthrown... Obviously, Marx saw something that others did not see: man is the product of social relations, and it is certain social relations that alienate man and make him lose his essence.
It is precisely because of this understanding that Marx devoted all his attention to exploring the relationship between people. He found that people's ideas, including religious consciousness, are the product of various social relations acting on people, and all social relations are determined by production relations, which are determined by productivity. Changes in productivity cause changes in the relationship between people in material production, and changes in production relations will lead to changes in other social relations. Changes in these relationships determine changes in people's ideas and, in turn, determine the reality of human nature. Human nature has thus become historical. We know that this is an important part of the materialist view of history discovered by Marx. In addition, Marx understood that people are not only in contact with other people, but also in mutual influence with nature, national culture, and national traditions, and in communication with other nations. The connection between things is multi-directional and three-dimensional.
It can be seen that what makes Marx different from others is that he realized that all beings are dynamic and in interaction with other things. Therefore, everything is the product of a certain relationship, and the change of things can only be achieved through their interaction and thus changing their mutual relationships.
In summary, Marx's dialectical thought highlights two dimensions of observing things, namely history and relationship, that is, the vertical, diachronic dimension and the horizontal, synchronic dimension. From the synchronic dimension, the world is like an extremely huge three-dimensional network. Each thing is a node in the network. The interaction between it and other things above, below, left and right constitutes the tension between them. The nature of other things and the magnitude of the tension between them determine its different characteristics and its relative position with other things. From the diachronic dimension, each node in this huge three-dimensional network and thus the entire network is in eternal change. Some nodes disappear, and some emerge again. Even things that continue to exist in a certain period of time are constantly changing. These factors cause the network itself to change constantly, making it in history. This is the complex material world in eternal dialectical movement. Only by following the two dimensions of synchronicity and diachrony can we locate a specific thing in the ever-changing three-dimensional network world, that is, make a reasonable explanation for it.
In Marx's dialectical thought, the inherent activity of matter, its desire, impulse, and tension to express itself and change other things, is crucial. The reason why a thing can interact with other things to form a certain relationship, and at the same time make itself and other things change historically, in a word, forming both horizontal and vertical changes, is because it has such activity.
3. Conclusion
The above analysis leads us to two conclusions: first, Marx has a dialectical materialist world outlook; second, his dialectical materialist thought is obviously different from the dialectical materialism that we usually say mainly comes from Engels's relevant discussions. These two conclusions have important theoretical significance. First, it expands and deepens our understanding of Marx's philosophical thought; second, more importantly, it can clarify many major issues in the study of Marxist philosophy. For more than a hundred years, due to the lack of in-depth discussion of Marx's dialectical materialist thought, people have equated dialectical materialism with Engels' relevant thoughts. This directly led some people to assert that Marx had such a dialectical materialist world outlook, but they could not find relevant discussions in Marx and it was difficult to justify themselves; in addition, because such a dialectical materialist world outlook did not look at the world from the subjective and active aspects, it only emphasized the objectivity of matter and ignored the important influence of human practical activities on the world, so it was actually no fundamentally different from the old materialism criticized by Marx himself, and could not be unified with his practical materialism thought, thus being criticized. Others, seeing Marx's emphasis on practice and his promotion of human subjectivity, flatly deny that Marx has dialectical materialism, which results in the opposition between Marx and Engels and the split of Marxist philosophy researchers. To say that Marx and Engels' philosophical thoughts are fundamentally different is inconsistent with the basic facts of their close cooperation for half a century. The analysis and discussion in this article will undoubtedly help solve the above-mentioned problems that have long troubled people in Marxist philosophy research.
By the way, the only thing Marx cared about was human liberation, so the most important thing for him and his unique philosophical thought was the materialist view of history that reveals the laws of development of human society and human beings. This view of history is his practical materialism. Engels called his and Marx's philosophy "a new school that found the key to understanding the entire social history in the history of labor development." However, Marx's practical materialist thought is completely consistent with his dialectical materialist worldview. Dialectical materialism is the theoretical background of all Marx's philosophical thoughts.
(Author’s unit: School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China)
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