What are the three laws of the dialectical method?
Dialectical philosophy became popular with the “Socratic dialogues” of Plato. The dialectical method is simply a set of rules applied together to more clearly understand our real interdependent world.
“Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of movement and development of nature, human society and thought.” (English)
Hegel brought together within his idealist philosophy the three laws of dialectics:
- The law of the unity and conflict of opposites (Heraclitus);
- The law of the passage from quantitative changes to qualitative changes (Aristotle);
- The law of the negation of the negation (Hegel).
The point here is that mankind used the dialectical method to investigate the surrounding world since 3000 years ago.
The unity and conflict of opposites.
The law of contradiction in things is the basic law of the materialist dialectic.
The world we live in is a unit of contradictions or a unit of opposites: hot-cold, light-dark, Capital-Labor, birth-death, wealth-poverty, positive-negative, boom-depression, thinking-being, finite. -infinity, repulsion-attraction, left-right, up-down, evolution-revolution, chance-need, sale-purchase, etc.
To understand something, its essence, it is necessary to look for internal contradictions. Under certain circumstances, the universal is the individual and the individual is the universal. That things turn into their opposites – cause can turn into effect and effect can turn into cause – is because they are mere links in the endless chain in the development of matter.
More example to illustrate the universality of the contradiction:
- In mathematics: + and–. Differential and integral.
- In mechanics: action and reaction.
- In physics: positive and negative electricity.
- In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms.
- In social sciences: the class struggle.
- In war: attack and defense, advance and retreat, victory and defeat. (Mao Zedong)
- Inhumans; inner divine spark and material body (visit Gnosticism on my site)
- In Eastern philosophy: Yin and Yang aspects.
Quantitative changes into qualitative changes
This is the cornerstone of understanding change. Change or evolution does not take place gradually in a straight and even line. There are long periods of evolution where no apparent change occurs and suddenly a new form or forms of life emerge. Development is characterized by breaks in continuity, jumps, catastrophes and revolutions.
The denial of the denial
The entire process can best be represented as a spiral, where the movement returns to the position in which it started, but at a higher level. In other words, historical progress is achieved through a series of contradictions. Where the previous stage is negative, this does not represent its total elimination. It does not completely erase the stage it supplants.
Engels explains a whole series of examples to illustrate the negation of the negation: “Take a grain of barley. Millions of such grains of barley are ground, boiled and processed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets the conditions that for him are normal, if it falls on suitable soil, then, under the influence of heat and moisture, a specific change occurs, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, is negated, and in its place appears the plant that has sprung from it, the negation of the grain.
But what is the normal life process of this plant? It grows, blossoms, fertilizes itself, and finally produces once more barley grains, and, as soon as these have ripened, the stalk dies, is itself denied. As a result of this negation of the negation we have the original barley grain again, but not as a single unit, but ten, twenty or thirty times.
An understanding of dialectical philosophy is an essential prerequisite for understanding the doctrine of contradictions. See my next article on social contradictions.