A vast literature has been devoted to the Dialectics of Nature and dialectics in Capital. There is a considerable number of works in which the connection between the philosophical generalization of natural science in the Dialectics of Nature and the philosophical aspects of the economic categories in Capital are analyzed. I should like to touch upon only one aspect of the problem — that aspect which pertains to certain new problems in philosophical and economic thought. (...) Reference is, first, to the new, unprecedented role of philosophy and natural science in the period of the scientific and technological revolution under the conditions of the unification and planning of science and, second, to the unprecedented dynamism of the economy today. This dynamism requires a radical rethinking of categories, and that rethinking, in turn, requires a return to the fundamental categories of Capital. (shrink)

A vast literature has been devoted to the Dialectics of Nature and dialectics in Capital. There is a considerable number of works in which the connection between the philosophical generalization of natural science in the Dialectics of Nature and the philosophical aspects of the economic categories in Capital are analyzed. I should like to touch upon only one aspect of the problem — that aspect which pertains to certain new problems in philosophical and economic thought. (...) Reference is, first, to the new, unprecedented role of philosophy and natural science in the period of the scientific and technological revolution under the conditions of the unification and planning of science and, second, to the unprecedented dynamism of the economy today. This dynamism requires a radical rethinking of categories, and that rethinking, in turn, requires a return to the fundamental categories of Capital. (shrink)

Yang Hsien-chen and other comrades' theory of "combining two into one" consciously uses the bourgeois world view to oppose the proletarian world outlook. It is basically opposed to the philosophy of Marxism. "Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. This law is universally existent in the natural world, human society, and people's thinking." However, the theory of "two into one" declares that "there is nothing in the phenomena of the (...) natural world, or in human society, thought, etc. which is not a case of ‘two combining into one.’" The law of the unity of opposites holds that all things in the world are always dividing into two opposite sides which struggle with each other in a unity. The unity of opposites is conditional and relative, but the struggle of opposites is unconditional and absolute. The theory of "two into one" asserts that "anything is a combination of two into one." "The unity of contradiction only means that the two sides of the contradiction are inseparably connected." However, the law of the unity of opposites holds that "the result of the struggle between the two opposite sides of the contradiction is that there is nothing which cannot be transformed into its opposite under definite conditions" , and "in human society and the natural world, unities are always splitting into different parts." The theory of "two into one" simply regroups the contradictory relationships of things into "two opposite sides indivisibly linked together" , that is, things possess a so-called "inseparability." Since the theory of "two into one" in this way obliterates antagonistic contradictions and the absoluteness of antagonism, it also denies that the antagonism of contradiction must, under certain conditions, lead to the splitting of a unity and the transformation of opposites. (shrink)

The resurrection of the classical Marxian ecological critique in the context of the current planetary emergency has led to the return of the concept of the dialectics of nature, associated with the work of Frederick Engels in particular. In the century following the deaths of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, the dialectics-of-nature conception played a formative role in the development of the modern ecological critique within science, notably in Britain, and helped inspire the contemporary environmentalist movement. (...) Nevertheless, all of this occurred outside the dominant streams of Marxian thought and practice, where a great chasm had arisen in this area. Whereas official Marxism in the Soviet Union reduced the dialectics of nature to a fixed dogma, Western Marxism rejected it altogether. In the current Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale – and in what is referred to here as the Capitalinian Age of the Anthropocene – a new historical-materialist synthesis constructed on classical foundations, reintegrating the dialectics of nature, so as to address the immense ecological challenges confronting humanity, is seen as objectively (and subjectively) necessary. (shrink)

As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later (...) works. Adorno’s continuing confrontation with the “domination of nature” traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of “nature” as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. It indicates the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering, the ambiguous role of mimesis in domination and emancipation, and the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom toward the object and answerability toward socially and historically mediated yet non-identical natural life. (shrink)

The concept of projection from one space to another, with a consequent loss of information, can be seen in the relationships of gene to protein and language description to real situation. Such a transformation can only be reversed if extra external information is re-supplied. The genetic algorithm embodying this idea is now used in applied mathematics for exploring a configuration space. Such a dialectic – transformation back and forth between two kinds of description – extends the traditional Hegelian concept used (...) by Engels and others of change as resulting from a resolution of the conflict of two opposing tendencies and provides for evolution of the joint system. (shrink)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of (...) contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. (shrink)

In a little remembered event in December 1961, Sartre entered into a debate with Roger Garaudy, as well as other representatives of the Parti Communiste Française (PCF), on the topic of the existence of a universal dialectical law applicable to nature as well as to human thought. In the debate, Sartre seeks to rebut the notion that humankind is merely an “alien addition“ to nature, as Engels maintained, and instead argues that individual subjectivity cannot be reduced to an (...) object of knowledge. This paper highlights the importance of the debate for both sides, but particularly for Sartre and his Critique of Dialectical Reason. (shrink)

This book offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current ecological crisis via the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's centrality in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers including Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the (...) interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. (shrink)

Within the current resurgence of interest in E.V. Ilyenkov, the influence of Engels on Ilyenkov’s work is either overlooked or denied, making Ilyenkov seem closer to Western Marxism than he actually is. In this paper, by considering Engels’s place in his philosophy, I show that Ilyenkov’s approach is fundamentally hostile to many of Western Marxism’s main views. Ilyenkov, like Engels, conceives philosophy as Logic and affirms the ‘alliance’ between philosophy and the natural sciences against speculative metaphysics. In this regard, he (...) develops an original cosmological hypothesis based on Engels’s insights on the hierarchy of matter’s forms of movement and provides a remarkable account of the ideal as an attribute of nature that reproduces its concrete universality through social labour, the active transformation of nature’s phenomena into objects stamped with the seal of our subjectivity. (shrink)

This book fundamentally challenges the radical credentials of post-structuralism. Though Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze claim to have 'deconstructed' metaphysics, their work has much in common with previous attempts to 'end' the metaphysical tradition, from Kant to Nietzshe and Heidegger, and by sociology in general. Gillian Rose shows that this anti-metaphysical writing always appears in historically specific jurisprudential terms, which themselves found and recapitulate metaphysical categories. She reconsiders post-structuralism in this light and assesses the relationship between deconstruction and the earlier structuralism (...) of Saussure and Levi-Strauss. She argues in conclusion that the choice between post-structuralist nihilism and Hegelian and Marxist dialectic is spurious. (shrink)

In The Dialectic of Duration Gaston Bachelard addresses the nature of time in response to the writings of his great contemporary, Henri Bergson. For Bachelard, experienced time is irreducibly fractured and interrupted, as indeed are material events. At stake is an entire conception of the physical world, an entire approach to the philosophy of science. It was in this work that Bachelard first marshalled all the components of his visionary philosophy of science, with its steady insistence on the human (...) context and subtle encompassing of the irrational within the rational. (shrink)

It is often believed that the only alternative to an idealist conception of natural phenomena excludes both the presence of objective universal forms and their progression towards higher forms as the finality of processes in the natural world. Realism regarding the universal and teleological approaches regarding processes are signs of idealism. Therefore, materialism, it would seem, must conform to a nominalist and mechanical view of nature. However, an intelligent materialist reading of idealism’s classics reveals a more complex scenario. A (...) real fact is expressed in a mystical fashion in idealism’s conceptions of objective universals and teleology. This article attempts to show such a real fact in its authentic (materialist) form. With that goal in mind, the present article discusses the notion of nature’s alienation, the distinction between abstract and concrete universals, and the concept of dialectical interaction. The natural-historical emergence of a higher form of matter’s organization assimilates, as its organs, the conditions that preceded it in time, transforming itself into an active producer of such conditions. That is the secret glimpsed but not correctly understood by idealism that a consistent materialist should not ignore. (shrink)

This work addresses the nature of time, taking issue specifically with Henri Bergson's notion of duration, or lived time. For Bachelard, the experience of lived time was fractured. He argues that there is no one underlying thread - that time is multiple and discrete.

This paper develops a dialectical methodology for assessing technoscience during the Anthropocene. How to practice Hegelian dialectics of technoscience today? First of all, dialectics is developed here in close interaction with contemporary technoscientific research endeavours, which are addressed from a position of proximity and from an ‘oblique’ perspective. Contrary to empirical research, the focus is on how basic concepts of life, nature and technology are acted out in practice. Notably, this paper zooms in on a synthetic cell (...) project called BaSyC as a concrete instantiation of converging views of life, nature and technology currently at work in technoscience. While dialectics is used to explore the significance of this project, the synthetic cell as a case study also allows us to demonstrate the remarkable relevance of dialectics for understanding contemporary research, notably because it incites us to see the synthetic cell project as a concrete exemplification of life under Anthropocenic conditions. Should we assess the synthetic cell as the ultimate realisation of the technoscientific will to control and optimise life, or rather as an effort to bridge the disruptive collision between technoscience and nature, or both? (shrink)

This celebrated work is the keystone of the thought of the Frankfurt School. It is a wide-ranging philosophical and psychological critique of the Western categories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche.

The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and communicates (...) entails a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I want to scrutinize one of the key ideas within modern Western aesthetics. Beauty is often considered to derive from a virtuous disinterested attitude towards nature. This kind of view has been advocated by thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Kant in the beginning of the so-called aesthetic turn in philosophy. The problem with this view is that it presupposes that nature exists by itself before human intervention in a kind of ideal pristine state. My hypothesis (...) is that this ideal of pristine nature constitutes one of the underlying problems of many contemporary environmental discourses. (shrink)

The Dialectic of Essence offers a systematic new account of Plato's metaphysics. Allan Silverman argues that the best way to make sense of the metaphysics as a whole is to examine carefully what Plato says about ousia (essence) from the Meno through the middle period dialogues, the Phaedo and the Republic, and into several late dialogues including the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Philebus, and the Timaeus. This book focuses on three fundamental facets of the metaphysics: the theory of Forms; the (...) nature of particulars; and Plato's understanding of the nature of metaphysical inquiry. Silverman seeks to show how Plato conceives of "Being" as a unique way in which an essence is related to a Form. Conversely, partaking ("having") is the way in which a material particular is related to its properties: Particulars, thus, in an important sense lack essence. Additionally, the author closely analyzes Plato's idea that the relation between Forms and particulars is mediated by form-copies. Even when some late dialogues provide a richer account of particulars, Silverman maintains that particulars are still denied essence. Indeed, with the Timaeus's introduction of the receptacle, there are no particulars of the traditional variety. This book cogently demonstrates that when we understand that Plato's concern with essence lies at the root of his metaphysics, we are better equipped to find our way through the labyrinth of his dialogues and to better appreciate how they form a coherent theory. (shrink)

This article analyses a sceptical challenge resulting from metaphysical approaches to the problem of the necessity of empirical laws of nature in Kant’s critical philosophy (what I shall call ‘essentialist’ readings). I argue that this challenge may jeopardize the purpose of empirical enquiry (and therefore the plausibility of essentialist readings), but that Kant has internal resources to address it in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. I show that reading this problem through the lens of the Dialectic (...) allows us to reconcile the metaphysical question of necessitation of laws with a robust sense of empirical cognition. (shrink)

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (first published in 1797 and revised in 1803), one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the (...) revisions of 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

Hegel’s specific interpretation of burial rituals in the Phenomenology is an important part of his general understanding of the development of human freedom and of spirit. For Hegel, freedom is not something immediately given, but something that must be realized by way of the self’s ongoing practical engagement with the world, and in particular by way of the self’s transformation of the otherwise meaningless realm of nature into a vehicle for realizing a specifically human meaning. The practice of burial (...) rites is construed as accomplishing such a transformation, and thereby as a crucial manner in which this dialectic between freedom and nature is played out. Attention is paid to Hegel’s conception of the earth as the material condition for freedom’s self-realization, and the symbolic dimension of burial rites is shown to have implications for Hegel’s overall theory of human agency. (shrink)

Aristotle writes the Art of Rhetoric rhetorically. His actions sometimes speak louder than his words. At first, he presents rhetoric as concerned with a species of logos, but gradually makes clear that all logos is somehow rhetorical. To understand human beings, the animals with logos, one must first understand logos, thinking through its dyadic structure as at once communication and articulation—a structure that guarantees its failure fully to articulate and fully to communicate. Now, persuasion proceeds “by speaking either examples or (...) enthymemes, and besides these nothing.” To understand the enthymeme proves to require an understanding of topos—topic. But topos becomes clear only by way of a long series of examples. Finally, then, it is owing to the example, its strange mixture of the universal and particular, that we understand what Aristotle is doing. The example, itself exemplary of the power logos is the key to understanding human nature. (shrink)

The famous triad of ‘rational proofs’ of God’s existence may, if their underlying intuitions are taken at face value, be reversed to prove the contrary, namely the non-existence of God. The ontological argument, for example, proceeds from the notion of God as the ‘real most’ or ‘absolutely real’ being. However, the existence of an entity thus defined must be beyond doubt, for if distinguishing between ‘levels of reality’ makes any sense at all, ‘more real’ must also mean ‘more manifest’. And (...) since a being whose existence is beyond doubt is greater than that whose existence is in doubt, God, to fit the definition provided by St. Anselm, must be a being the existence of which cannot be doubted or, more strictly, the existence of which can only come to be doubted if He did not exist to dispel all doubts. Hence it follows that God does not exist, because it is an undeniable fact that His existence is subject to doubt. This paper is not, however, about theexistence of God, it is about the inherent dialectic of theological reason that seeks non-natural or supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. (shrink)

An analysis of Hegel's chapter on teleology in the Science of Logic. Hegel argues that the 'intentional model' of teleology assumed by Kant actually presupposes a natural or organic teleology more like along Aristotelian lines.

It is not uncommon for a treatment of rights to be treatment against power with some concession to the responsibilities that a tutelary of rights enjoys. We owe it to legal philosophers of the Scholastic persuasion who recognized rights as the entitlements that allow a person to fulfill duties— whether these arise from nature or from contract. In this sense rights were subordinate to and enjoyed for the sake of duties that one had. One may debate this way of (...) putting things, but it had the marked advantage of clarity and showed the internal connection between rights and duties. Also in the scholastic anatomy of rights, there was such a thing as the “term” of the right—he against whom the right could be claimed, and therefore he or she upon whom a duty was incumbent to desist from transgressing the right of the tutelary. In this sense a “right to” was concomitantly “power against,” but power, in the sense of claim or entitlement. For the power to enforce, one had to look to what scholastic philosophers called the “title” of the right—and this could be natural law, positive law that, of course, included contracts. I do not think that this was bad at all, but I would like to pick up the subject today by paying attention to two leading figures: Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel describes at length and in detail the particular workings of animal digestion and excretion, referring to the empirical research of his day (Berzelius, Spallanzani, Traviranus). By becoming engaged in the scientific disputes and insights of the time—regarding, for example, the mechanical versus chemical nature of digestion, immediate digestive assimilation and the chemical composition of feces—Hegel arrives at the novel idea that what the animal excretes as superfluous is its own particular entanglement with (...) inorganic otherness. The animal’s subsequent feeling of triumph and satisfaction constitutes the affirmation of individual purposiveness, a form of immediate ideality that Hegel presents as animal subjectivity. (shrink)