Dictionary of philosophy (translation of: Filosofskii slovar)/ edited by Murad Saifulin and the late Richard R. Dixon, Publisher New York : International Publishers, 1984
Dialectics, science of the more general laws governing the development of nature, society, and thought. The scientific history of development and the very concept of D. emerged through revising, even overcoming, the original meaning of the term. Originally, the term (art of dialectic) denoted: a) the art of debate by means of questions and answers, and b) the art of classifying concepts, dividing things into genera and species. In antiquity philosophers strongly stressed the mutability of all the existent a and considered reality as a process, postulating change of every property [] conception of D. was preceded by a long opposite. Take Heraclitus (q.v.), some of the Milesian philosophers, and the Pythagoreans. But the term D. was not as yet used. Aristotle (q.v.) believed that D. had been invented by Zeno of Elea (q.v.), who analyzed the conflicting aspects in the concepts of motion and plurality. Aristotle differentiated D., the science of probable opinions, from analytics, the science of proofs. Plato (q.v.) defined true being as identical and immutable, yet gave credence to the dialectical conclusion that the higher genera of the existent can each be conceived only as being and not being, as equal to themselves and not equal to themselves, as identical to themselves and as passing into "something else". Therefore, being contains contradictions: it is single and plural, eternal and transient, immutable and mutable, at rest and in motion. Contradiction is the necessary condition for prompting the soul to reflection. This art, according to Plato, is the art of D. In scholasticism (q.v.), the philosophy of feudal society, the term of D. was used to denote formal logic as opposed to rhetoric. In the epoch of Renaissance (q.v.), dialectical ideas on the "coincidence of opposites" were enunciated by Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno (qq.v.). Later, despite the prevalence of metaphysics (q.v.), Descartes and Spinoza (44.v.) produced specimens of dialectical thought. In the 18th century in France, a wealth of dialectical ideas was produced by Rousseau and Diderot (qq.v.). Rousseau examined contradiction as a condition of historical development. Diderot went a step further and investigated contradictions in the contemporary social consciousness. The most important preMarxian stage in the development of D. was classical German idealism which, in contrast to metaphysical materialism, considered reality not merely as an object of cognition, but also as an object of activity. However, ignorance of the true, material basis of cognition and activity of the subject limited and distorted the dialectical notions of the German idealists. The first to make a breach in metaphysics was Kant (q.v.). He noted the purpose of opposite forces in the physical and cosmogonic processes and followed Descartes by introducing the idea of development into cognition of nature. In his epistemology, Kant developed dialectical ideas in his teaching of antinomies. Yet he described D. of reason as an illusion which evaporates as soon as thought recedes within itself, bounded by the cognition of phenomena proper. After Kant, Schelling too, developed a dialectical appreciation of the processes of nature. The idealistic D. of Hegel (q.v.) was the summit in the development of pre-Marxian D. "For the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e, as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development" (F. Engels, Anti-Diihring, pp. 31-32). The result of Hegel's D. transcended by far the significance which the author himself ascribed to it. Hegel's teaching on the necessity with which all things arrive at their own negation, contained an element which revolutionised life and thought, for which reason the foremost thinkers of the time regarded his D. as the "
Dialectical Logic (DL)
Scientifically, D.L. arose as part of Marxist philosophy. However, its elements were already in evidence in antique philosophy, particularly the doctrines of Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle (qq.v.), and others. For historical reasons, formal logic (q.v.) reigned for a long time as the sole teaching on the laws and forms of thought. Approximately in the 17th century, developing natural science and philosophy revealed their insufficiencies and highlighted the need for a new teaching on the general principles and methods of thought and cognition (F. Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, qq.v., and others). This tendency emerged most clearly in classical German philosophy (q.v.). Kant (q.v.), for instance, distinguished between general and transcendental logic, the latter differing from the former, i.e, formal logic, in that it examined the development of knowledge and did not abstract itself, as the former, from the content. Special credit in the development of D.L. goes to Hegel(q.v.), who produced the earliest comprehensive system which was, however, permeated with his idealistic outlook. The Marxist teaching on logic absorbed all the valuable elements of the preceding development, molding the vast experience of human consciousness into a strict science of cognition. D.L. does not reject formal logic, but demonstrates its limits, its place and role in the study of the laws and forms of thought. While formal logic is the science of the laws and forms of reflection of constancy in thought and rest in the objective world, D.L. is the study of reflection in the laws and forms of thought of the processes of development (q.v.), of the internal contradictions (q.v.) of phenomena, their qualitative change, the passage of one into another, etc. As a science D.L. is possible only on the basis of dialectico-materialist method and at once it serves, as it were, as its concretisation by investigating the laws and forms of reflection in thought, the manifestation of infinite motion in the finite, the unity of the infinite and the finite in motion, the internal and the external, etc. The cardinal task of D.L. is to investigate how it is best to express in concepts the operation of the laws of dialectics in things, objects, etc. With this the other basic task of D.L. is associated, namely, the examination of the development of cognition itself. D.L. identifies the laws and forms of development of thought in the course of development of cognition and the historical social practice. The method of ascension from the abstract to the concrete (see Abstract and Concrete) is used by D.L. as a general logical principle. Another general principle of D.L. is the unity of the historical and logical (q.v.). Both principles are interconnected and interpenetrating. Thought goes from the surface of objects and things to their essence and then also comprehends its real manifestations. When examined logically, a process, a phenomenon, an aspect, etc., are taken in their developed, mature form, and this makes it possible to understand both the past existing in the present in a sublated form and the future, since it exists already in the present albeit in an undeveloped, embryonic form. Thus, by investigating the reflection of the processes of development in the laws and forms of thought, D.L. also investigates the development of thought and the system of its categories changes with the historical development of cognition and buman practice. In contemporary science a big part is played by formalised logical systems and substantive formal logical theories which study the various aspects and tasks of thought. D.L. is the general logical basis of human cognition, the general logical theory which can and must be employed to explain all the particular and concrete logical theories, their significance and role.
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