Dialectical materialism

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From my notebook on dialectical materialism

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Notes on George Novack's article
Elements of Dialectical Materialism


....Dialectical materialism covers the universe at large, historical materialism human society, and scientific socialism human society in its present and prospective phase of existence.

Dialectical materialism is the philosophical foundation of Marxism....Marxism is the scientific theory of the revolutionary proletarian movement which aims to overthrow the outlived capitalist system and erect a new socialist order in its stead.

....has a universal character....all reality for its province. The materialist dialectics applies to all phenomena from the most distant nebulae and the most remote time to man’s most intimate feelings and elevated thoughts.
....all departments of knowledge, contesting the right of rival ideologies to rule over them.
....a monistic view of the universe.
....regards reality as a single historical process of material development. This process is unified by its material constitution and connections.
....subdivisions of existence continue to maintain essential relations with one another and with the historical process as a whole.
.....Nature, society, and the human mind are three qualitatively different yet organically related creations and constituents of the one historical process. Nature is the primary product of material evolution; society developed out of nature and consciousness out of society.
....inner unity
....organic interconnections
....systematic character
....derived from a comprehensive study of natural, social and intellectual processes and relations.

....basic conceptions....taken from nature, not arbitrarily imposed upon it.... reflect processes, forces, and relations which actually exist and operate in objective reality before they have been formulated by dialectic thought....

....human society [associated human beings] is an intrinsic part of the material world, an extension and off-spring of it.
....[human society has] ....its own special laws of development, which had to be discovered before mankind could obtain a scientific knowledge of society.
....Marx gave to the world for the first time the key to an understanding of the laws governing the evolution of society....theory and method of historical materialism....
....each stage in the evolution of society on this planet has had its own kind of material organization and special laws of development.

....Dialectical materialism
....historical materialism
....scientific socialism
....unfold one out of the other, the specific from the general, the concrete from the abstract. They are so organically interlinked that they cannot really be disjoined, although they may be considered separately for purposes of thought.

....reality:
....nature....universe in all its manifestations [is] matter in motion....modes of material motion are as endlessly varied as its actual and potential formations.
....society
....human consciousness....Consciousness arises in the human species on the threshold of its emergence from the animal state as an expression and expansion of social life.... in conjunction with the production of the material means of their social existence.
....Each subsequent stage of social development has had an intellectual organization, forms of consciousness, and methods of thought corresponding to its productive powers and material level. The higher the level of social development, the greater has been the comprehension of reality since each successive step in the progress of human knowledge is based upon the material and intellectual acquisitions of its predecessors.
....dialectical method of reasoning about material reality is the highest form of conscious thought.
....coherence of Marxist theory is rooted in the material unity of the historical process.

....modes of material motion are as endlessly varied as its actual and potential formations. The network of electronic pulsations in the subatomic world, the rush of the planets through space, the migrations of animals, the activities of society, and the intricate circuits of the human nervous system and brain are all combinations of material motion in a lower or higher degree of development.
.... properties of matter are limitless....constantly being brought forth.

....physical world existed before the appearance of mankind or any living being on this earth. It maintains itself independently of man’s existence, perception, or thought. Neither God nor mankind created the world; the world gave birth to man and man created the idea of God.

Theory of Knowledge
.... human mind....a material phenomenon....natural outgrowth and the highest product of universal evolution.
....life-cycle of the individual reproduces in a condensed version the historical evolution of the species.
....collective intelligence of mankind has developed out of nature and society....
....mind ....function of ....brain and ....body.
....dependence of mind upon its material bases.
....remembering, dreaming, learning, reasoning, speaking, etc., have the same material character as such functions of the digestive apparatus as swallowing, chewing, digesting and excreting.
....Through the brain and nervous system the mind is connected with the body, through the body with society, and through society with the rest of nature. These spheres of existence provide the mind with the materials and motives for its activities just as they furnish the stomach with the food for its assimilation.
....permanently anchored to these material foundations.
....Nature is the mother of all things and all ideas, and to it they eventually return.

“How can we know the world around us?”
....mental activity transforms physical sensations into particular ideas and systems of thought just as physical labor converts sugar-cane into pure sugar.
....one kind of organic energy, absorbs and alters its materials like any other natural agency into something bearing its own stamp and characteristic of its own mode of production.
....human reflection
....intellectual penetration
....philosophical conception
....no impassable barriers
....one part and process of nature to react to and act upon another, to represent and to transform it, to separate, to recombine and to express its essential qualities.

“How can the mind know the truth about the external world?”
....intellectual capacities, ideas, and philosophies have developed along with and out of man’s social struggle against nature and .... growing mastery over it.
....If their thought did not more or less correctly represent objective reality, if it did not help them to function more efficiently, if it did not force nature to serve man’s ends and thus satisfy his vital needs, men would long since have ceased to cultivate their mental powers. These would have withered away or diminished in importance like the caudal appendage or the sense of smell.
....practice = man’s ability to know the external world truly....
....improvement in man’s material circumstances and powers of production has been accompanied by an advance in his mental capacities.


Materialism Versus Idealism

....two main schools of thought....question of the relations between mind and matter ....
....materialists view matter as the primary reality, regarding sensation, consciousness, and reasoning as secondary and derivative qualities.
....mind is a product of natural evolution....
....mental operations as functions and forms of organic behavior....
....materialism holds fast to the unshakeable conviction, confirmed by the intellectual progress of humanity, by scientific knowledge, and by everyday experience, that the world around us is subject to intellectual penetration and comprehension in ever-increasing measure.
....However imperfect, partial, and approximate our ideas of reality must necessarily be at any given time, materialism, unlike religious or idealist theories of knowledge, refuses to idolize and prostrate itself before man’s present ignorance.
....mankind is today only at the beginning.
....fact that one portion of material reality, the mind, possesses properties and products not to be found elsewhere is not peculiar to the mind. It is a universal feature of reality.... much in the rest of nature that has not yet and never will be possessed by the mind. Humanity’s imagination is still surpassed by its ignorance.

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notes on
George Novack: Engels on Dialectics of Nature


....dialectical laws are conceptual formulations of objective material realities.

....principal task of the bourgeoisie at that period [at end of Middle Ages] was to augment the productive forces, thereby increasing their own wealth and power.
....job of the proletariat under capitalist domination was less to increase the productive forces of society, as the bourgeoisie was compelled to do under feudal rule, than to free the already highly developed productive forces from the dead hand of capitalist ownership and control.

....dialectical materialism was essentially a universal system of thought, embracing both nature and society, its detailed application to the theoretical problems of the natural sciences had to be postponed for later consideration.
....Engels: "....t a knowledge of mathematics and natural science is essential to a conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist. Marx was well versed in mathematics, but we could only partially, intermittently and sporadically keep up with the natural sciences....I went through as complete as possible a ‘moulting,’ as Liebig calls it, in mathematics and the natural sciences, and spent the best part of eight years on it.”

....processes of nature obey the same general laws of motion as social and intellectual processes...."....amid the welter of innumerable changes taking place in nature, the same dialectical laws are in operation as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws as those which similarly form the thread running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to consciousness in the mind of man ...” and which were first formulated by Hegel in mystical form before Marx and Engels refashioned them into the materialist dialectic.
....“the view that the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from protozoa to men, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change.”

[Hegel]....provided natural science with the intellectual means for its emancipation from the old outlook and for the construction of a new one.... first systematic conception of the whole natural, social and spiritual world as a continuous process of development.
....give a rational form and evolve a rational method out of the many-sided, contradictory processes of evolution.

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....three principal laws of dialectics [really laws of development in nature and therefore valid for theoretical natural science]:

....law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa
....qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion (so-called energy)....quantitative variations are directly linked with the production of qualitative differences.

....law of the interpenetration of opposites
....everything has a self-contradictory character, containing within itself its own opposite.
....manifests itself in change, which is a process of alteration, or transformation of something from its original state through a series of intermediate variations into its opposite.
....waves and particles can no longer be considered absolute opposites; that they can be united in a single entity; that they can possess the same properties; and that, under certain conditions, they can be transformed into one another.

....law of the negation of the negation
....fundamental law for the construction of [Hegel's] whole system of thought....expresses the fundamental form of development in nature.
....opposing forces at work in every single thing....changes accumulate in quantity until, at a certain determinate stage in the process of development, a distinct qualitative transformation or leap occurs. The thing loses its original identity and passes over into its opposite.
....new form of material existence is no less self-contradictory than the old and subject to the same internal restlessness....first negation in turn undergoes self-differentiation and division until it, too, passes into its own opposite and thereby becomes negated. The final result of this process is called the negation of the negation, a synthetic unity which has discarded the transitional forms but preserved within itself the essential content of both sides of the contradictory whole.
....conversion of mechanical motion into heat is therefore a negation of the negation, a reversion of the material motion to the original state of repulsion, but on a higher level of development.
[man generated heat via motion, then negated that first negation by converting heat into motion].
....law of the negation of the negation would not have forced its way into conscious thought unless it had already been operative in physical processes and in social life.

....Dialectical materialism shows....quantitative identity between the two forms of motion, formulated by the law of the quantitative equivalence of motion through all its changes of form.... also explains their qualitative diversity and the manner of their mutual metamorphoses.
....dialectical materialism regards the task of science to be, not the reduction of all modes of motion into one, but the study of the main forms of material motion in their natural sequence, dialectical interconnections, and transformations into one another.
....different modes of motion, mechanical, molecular, atomic, electronic, chemical, thermal, organic, social, and intellectual, have developed one out of the other through the interplay of attraction and repulsion, the original contradictory essence of motion.
....All the diverse departments of human knowledge from astronomy to logic are correlated into one vast synthesis.

....Lenin’s Materialism and Empiric-Criticism and his notebooks on Hegel’s logic made possible a renaissance of the philosophy of Marxism and cleared a path for the extension of its ideas and methods to the problems confronting physical science.

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