Hegel and Marx: Dialectics and Dialectical Materialism
Dialectics: Hegel / Marx
Dialectics is a method of reasoning, questioning, and interpretation that has received several meanings throughout the history of philosophy. Some of these meanings are: the art of dialogue and discussion; a technique of reasoning that proceeds through the deployment of a thesis and antithesis, resolving the contradiction through the formulation of a final synthesis, and the struggle of opposites by which progress arises.
History (Hegel and Marx)
Hegel’s Dialectic
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel applied the term dialectic to his philosophical system and its logic, focusing on evolution, contradiction, and change. Hegel made the first comprehensive analysis of the laws of the Dialectic.
Unity and Struggle of Opposites
The two poles of a contrast, such as positive and negative, are as inseparable from each other as they are opposed to each other, and despite all their opposition, they interpenetrate each other.
Transition from Quantity to Quality and Vice Versa
The changes in quantity and quality are interconnected and cause each other. Hegel developed the idea of a nodal line in which, at a definite point, a purely quantitative increase or decrease leads to a qualitative leap.
Denial of Denial
The law of negation of negation is concerned with the nature of development through a series of contradictions that appear to cancel, deny a form of existence, a fact, or an earlier theory, and later, in its time, also be denied. The movement, change, and development proceed this way, through an unbroken series of denials.
Dialectic of Marx: Dialectical Materialism
This current defines philosophical matter as the substratum of any objective reality (physical) and subjective (thought) and the interaction of the same, emancipating the primacy and independence of matter to consciousness and the spiritual, declaring the knowability of the world under material nature, and applying the dialectic to interpret the world.
Dialectical materialism, as a philosophical system, is a conception and interpretation of the world opposed to philosophical idealism represented by the magical conception of religion and the primacy of the spirit (God) over the subject.
Dialectics of Nature proceeds along three major dialectical laws. Denying that there are contradictions in nature is to maintain a metaphysical position; it is certain that the movement itself is full of contradictions. Without the constant struggle of opposites, changes cannot be explained.
Everything that exists, exists by necessity. But, in the same way, all that exists is doomed to be transformed into something else.
These theories are based on a common philosophy: dialectics. They converge in fundamentals, such as the three basic laws: the law of the transition from quantity to quality, the law of the interpenetration of opposites, and the law of negation of negation. The fundamental differences between Marx and the Hegelian dialectic are as follows:
- “For Hegel, the subject of the dialectics is the Idea or God; for Marx, the finite world, nature, and the human world. Hegel was right to emphasize the global nature and dialectic of changes in natural processes but erred in making these changes manifestations of ‘spirit’.”
- “For Hegel, the moment of negation of negation (the synthesis) includes within it the previous time (the thesis and antithesis); for Marx, the negation of negation does not necessarily do so; Marx notes rather the moment of contradiction, confrontation between opposing elements, and their ability to promote change.”