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The dialectical method of thinking had played a great role in Antiquity, particularly in the naïve but brilliant aphorisms of Heraclitus (c.500 B.C.), but also in Aristotle and others. It was abandoned in the Middle Ages, when the Church turned Aristotle’s formal logic into a lifeless and rigid dogma, and did not re-appear until Kant returned it to a place of honour. However, in Kant the dialectic did not receive an adequate development. It fell to Hegel to bring the science of dialectical thinking to its highest point of development.

Hegel’s greatness is shown by the fact that he alone was prepared to challenge the dominant philosophy of mechanism. The dialectical philosophy of Hegel deals with processes, not isolated events. It deals with things in their life, not their death, in their inter-relations, not isolated, one after the other. This is a startlingly modern and scientific way of looking at the world. Indeed, in many aspects Hegel was far in advance of his time. Yet, despite its many brilliant insights, Hegel’s philosophy was ultimately unsatisfactory. Its principal defect was precisely Hegel’s idealist standpoint, which prevented him from applying the dialectical method to the real world in a consistently scientific way. Instead of the material world we have the world of the Absolute Idea, where real things, processes and people are replaced by insubstantial shadows. In the words of Frederick Engels, the Hegelian dialectic was the most colossal miscarriage in the whole history of philosophy. Correct ideas are here seen standing on their head. In order to put dialectics on a sound foundation, it was necessary to turn Hegel upside down, to transform idealist dialectics into dialectical materialism. This was the great achievement of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Our study begins with a brief account of the basic laws of materialist dialectics worked out by them.

Bibliography

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, London, 1961

2. Asimov, I., New Guide to Science, London, 1987

3. Buchsbaum, R., Animals Without Backbones, 2 vols., London, 1966

4. Bukharin, N. I. and others, Marxism and Modern Thought, London, 1935

5. Burn, A. R., The Pelican History of Greece, London, 1966

6. Calder, N., Einstein’s Universe, London, 1986

7. Darwin, C., The Origin of Species, London, 1929

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