Friedrich Engels - Landmarks of Scientific Socialism - Anti-Duehring

For the metaphysician, things and their pictures in the minds, concepts, are separate entities, one following the other without any regard to each other, stable, rigid, eternally fixed objects of investigation. The metaphysician thinks in antitheses. His conversation is "Yea, yea; Nay, nay" and whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. For him a thing exists or it does not exist, a thing can never be itself and something else at the same time; positive and negative are mutually exclusive, cause and effect stand in stiff antagonism to each other. This method of thought seems at the first glance to be quite plausible because it is in accordance with sound common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow though he may be in his own home surrounded by his four walls, meets with strange adventures when he betakes himself into the wide world of investigation; and the metaphysical way of looking at things, sound and useful as it is, under given conditions, runs sooner or later into a stone wall, beyond which it is one-sided, stupid and abstract, and loses itself in insoluble contradictions. Because it omits to notice the interrelations of the individual phenomena, their existence, their coming and their going, their static and mobile conditions, and so to speak does not see the forest for trees. We know for example, with sufficient certainty for every day affairs, whether an animal is alive or dead, but, on closer examination, we find that this is sometimes no easy matter to decide, as jurists know very well and have gone indeed to great pains to discover a rational border line beyond which the killing of a child in the womb of its mother is murder. It is just as impossible too to fix the precise moment of death, for physiology shows that death is not a single and sudden event but a very slow process. Just so is every organic being at the same moment itself and not itself. Every moment it takes up matter coming to it from the outside and throws off other matter, every moment its body-cells die and are recreated. Indeed after a longer or shorter period the whole material of the body is renewed through the taking up of other particles of matter so that each organic being is at the same time itself and something else. We find also if we look at the matter more closely that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, are just as inseparable as they are antagonistic, and that they, in spite of all their fixed antagonisms permeate each other, also that the cause and effect are concepts which can only realise themselves in relation to a particular case. However when we come to examine the separate case in its general relation to the world at large they come together and dissolve themselves in face of the working out of the universal problem, for, here, cause and effect exchange places, what was at one time and place effect becoming cause and vice versa.

All these phenomena and thought-concepts do not fit into the frame of metaphysical philosophy. According to the dialectic method of thinking which regards things and their concepts in relation to their connection with each other, their concatenation, their coming into being and passing away, phenomena, like the preceding, are so many confirmations of its own philosophy. Nature is the proof of the dialectic, and we must give to modern science the credit of having furnished an extraordinary wealth and daily increasing store of material towards this proof, and thereby showing in the last instance things proceed dialectically and not in accordance with metaphysical notions. But as the scientists who have learned to think dialectically may be still easily counted, the chaos arising from the confusion between actual results and an antiquated mode of thought is thus explained, and this confusion is to-day dominant in theoretical science, and drives teachers and pupils, writers and readers to despair.

A correct notion of the universe, of the human race, as well as of the reflection of this progress in the human mind can only be had by means of the dialectic method, together with a steady observation of the change and interchange which goes on in the universe, the coming into existence and passing away, progressive and retrogressive modification.

And the later German philosophy has proceeded from this standpoint. Kant began his career in this way by abolishing Newton's conception of a stable solar system which persisted after receiving its first impulse, in favor of a historical process, to wit, the origin of the sun and all the planets from a rotating mass of nebulæ. From this concept he drew the conclusion that, granted this origin, the future dissolution of the solar system is inevitable. His theory was mathematically proved by Laplace half a century later, and half a century later still the spectroscope discovered the existence of such glowing masses of gas in space in different stages of condensation.

This later German philosophy found its conclusion in the philosophy of Hegel where for the first time, and this is his greatest service, the entire natural, historical and spiritual universe was regarded as a process, that is, as in constant progress, change, transformation and development, and the attempt was made to show the more subtle relations of this process and development. From this historical point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a barren confusion of mindless forces, all alike subject to rejection before the judgment seat of the most recently ripened philosophy, and which, at the very best, man puts out of his mind as soon as possible, but as the development-process of humanity itself, to follow the process of which, little by little, through all its ramifications, and to establish the essential laws of which, in spite of all apparent accidents, is now the task of philosophic thought.

It is immaterial at this place that Hegel did not solve this problem. His epoch-making service was to have proposed it. It is a problem, moreover, which no individual can solve. Though Hegel, next to Saint Simon, was the most universal intellect of his time he was still limited, in the first place, through the necessarily narrow grasp of his own knowledge and in addition through the limitations of the contemporary conditions of knowledge. There was a third reason, too. Hegel was an idealist, that is he regarded thought not as a mere abstract representation of real phenomena, but, on the contrary, phenomena and their development appeared to him as the representations of the Idea which existed before the world. The result was an inversion of everything, the actual interrelations of the universe were turned completely upside down, and though of these interrelations, many single ones were set out justly and correctly by Hegel, much of the detail is patched, labored, made up, in short, incorrect. The Hegelian system was, to speak briefly, a colossal miscarriage, and the last of its kind. It rested on an incurable contradiction; on the other hand, it actually proclaimed the historical conception according to which human history is a process of development, which, in its very nature, cannot find its intellectual conclusion in the discovery of a so-called absolute truth, on the other hand it declared itself to be the central idea of just such an absolute truth. An all embracing and determined knowledge of nature and history is in absolute contradiction with the foundations of dialectic thought, but it is not denied, on the contrary, it is strongly affirmed, that the systematic knowledge of the entire external world may from age to age make giant strides.

The total perversion of modern German idealism of necessity drove men to materialism, but not, and this is well worth noting, to the mere metaphysical mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century. In contradiction to the naïvely simple revolutionary pushing on one side of all earlier history, modern materialism sees in history the process of the development of society, to discover the laws of whose development is its task. In contradistinction to the conception of nature which prevailed among the French philosophers, as well as with Hegel, as something moving in a narrow circle with an eternal and unchangeable substantial form, as Newton conceived it, and with invariable species of organic beings, as Linnæus thought, materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature has also a history in time. For the forms of the worlds, like the species of organisms by which they are inhabited under suitable conditions, come into being and pass away, and the cycles of their progress, in so far as it is permissible to use the term, take on eternally more magnificent dimensions. In either case it is entirely dialectic and no longer forces a static philosophy upon the other sciences. As soon as the demand is made upon each separate branch of science that it make clear its relation to things in general, and science as a whole, the individual science thereupon becomes superfluous. Of all philosophy up to the present time the only peculiar property which remains as its characteristic is the study of thought and the formal laws of thought – logic and the dialectic. All else belongs to the positive sciences of nature and history.