Dialectical Materialism

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM. - D. m. is a form of materialism which asserts, in contrast to mechanistic m., the specific difference of the higher spheres of reality (life, consciousness) from the lower ones (physical and chemical phenomena) and the formal impossibility of reducing the former to the latter, even though, insofar as it is materialism, it maintains the derivation of the higher from the lower. The philosophical justification of the derivation of the higher phenomena from the lower ones in the course of the process of evolution should be given by the assumption and by the materialistic "overturning" of the Hegelian dialectic. D. m. is the official Weltanschauung of the Soviet State and the philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism.

I. HISTORICAL NOTES

Granted that Marx contributed to carrying out the materialist overturning of Hegel begun by Feuerbach, and considered Nature (and man as a part of it) as primary reality and spirit as derivative, but at the same time preserved the Hegelian heritage of dialectics, he can be considered the father of d. m. (v. M. STORICO). But anyone who believed he could find in Marx's philosophical writings (belonging to his early period) the individual theses as they are formulated in today's system of d. m. would be disappointed.

The true creator of the system must be considered Engels, who extended to Nature, and thereby to the whole of reality, the unification of materialism and dialectics that Marx had accomplished in the historical field. He also formulated the three "laws of materialist dialectics": the law of the passage from quantity to quality, the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and the law of the negation of the negation; and he further laid the foundation of the epistemological theory of d. m., the so-called "theory of the image." Lenin takes up d. m. in its Engelsian form and defends it against revisionism, especially against Russian revisionism. After his death, in the Soviet Union there came about first a revival of mechanism (v.), which sought to reduce all higher phenomena simply to physico-chemical laws and which often even denied every philosophy the right to exist, intending to replace it with the "latest conclusions of science." However, from 1925, especially through the effect exercised by the popularization of the Engelsian fragments on the "dialectics of nature" and through the influence of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow 1933), an opposing opinion began to manifest itself, growing ever stronger, which, under the guidance of A. M. Deborin, defended d. m. with the greatest energy.

The struggle between the two tendencies continued violently until 1931 and ended, indeed, with the condemnation of both currents by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. (25 Jan. 1931). Mechanism was condemned as the philosophical basis of "right deviationism" (opposition to the forced collectivization of the countryside; v. BOLSCEVISMO); Deborinism, which received the label of "Menshevizing idealism," as the philosophical basis of "left deviationism" (Trotskyism). The new philosophical current that took its place, in which M. Mitin especially emerges, is obliged to adhere most strictly to the political struggle of the Party; the first duty of Soviet philosophy is to support the Party in its struggle against right and left deviations and to wage, also in the philosophical field, a battle on two fronts against mechanism and Menshevizing idealism. After this, the most important event in the life of Soviet philosophy is the publication of the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Soviet Union, a short manual, with a chapter of 27 pages written personally by Stalin: On Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which constitutes a dense exposition of the principal theses of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and social doctrine and which, today, is regarded in communist circles as the most decisive philosophical work in world history, one that "raises d. m. to a new, higher degree and represents the true summit of Marxist-Leninist philosophical thought." As regards its content, however, this work brings nothing new in comparison with Engels and Lenin.

A considerable revival of Soviet philosophy must be noted after the end of the Second World War, not in the sense of a further creative elaboration of Soviet d. m., but rather of a quantitative increase in philosophical production. Of decisive importance, from this point of view, was the Philosophical Discussion of June 1947, in which, on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Party, G. E. Aleksandrov's History of Western European Philosophy, already crowned with the Stalin Prize, was criticized, particularly by Zhdanov. Aleksandrov's errors, like those of all the "workers of philosophy," consisted principally in formal "objectivity," that is, in the fact that Aleksandrov treated opponents too courteously and subjected their systems to a critique too lacking in passion; in the lack of a combative party spirit; in a servile attitude toward bourgeois culture, and the like. Similar attacks on the part of the Party's highest directing body are recorded (v. BOLSCEVISMO) in recent years also in different fields of ideological work: namely in the biological field (v. MICURIN), and in the linguistic field (the "discussion" of July 1950, with Stalin's personal intervention, in which N. J. Marr [1884-1934], until then the uncontested authority of Soviet linguistics, was demolished). The philosophical discussion of 1947 gave rise to the quarterly journal Problems of Philosophy.

In the following columns d. m. will be expounded in its Soviet formulation, which represents the obligatory and fundamental Weltanschauung of world communism. Outside the Soviet Union there exist other forms of this philosophy in the communist field, which, however, more or less constitute personal systems (e.g., Max Raphael, H. Lefebvre, Banfi, the recent philosophical group that expresses itself in Italy in the journal Il costume) and would be considered by official Soviet philosophy as idealistic deviations.

II. CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY

The fruit of the struggle against mechanism was the conviction that philosophy must be granted without qualification the right to exist as a science in its own right, alongside the other sciences. It constitutes the foundation on which alone the individual sciences can be elaborated, and it resolves the problem of the specific object with which each of the sciences deals: a world that exists independently of the thinking subject or of the products of thought. Philosophy must therefore be considered not as pure methodology, but also as a Weltanschauung, as a theory of the real.

Hence arises the problem of the relations between philosophy and science. For dialectical materialism the object of philosophy is "the general laws of motion and evolution of Nature, of human society and of thought" (Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1946, p. 173), hence, above all, the most general laws of reality; whereas each of the particular sciences considers the laws and the structure of a determinate section of reality. While in Engels there persisted the tendency to limit the object of philosophy, separating off ever more numerous fields reserved to particular sciences, in present-day Soviet philosophy one can observe on the contrary the tendency to restore to their rights the disciplines banished by Engels from the field of philosophy. In the Philosophical Institute of the U.S.S.R. new sections have arisen: logic, philosophy of the natural sciences, psychology; there are calls for the establishment of special chairs of aesthetics and pedagogy in the Faculties of Philosophy; great attention is devoted to the problems of ethics, etc.

The particular character of Soviet philosophy is revealed, better than elsewhere, in its method, with two principles that give it a particular aspect: the requirement of the unity of theory and practice and that of a "Party spirit" in philosophical work. The unity of theory and practice arises automatically from the Marxist concept of "practice" (v. M. STORICO), which is nothing other than a prolongation of philosophy into practical activity, the "realization" of philosophy. "Theory — says Stalin — becomes devoid of object if it is not linked with revolutionary practice, exactly in the same way that practice becomes blind if the road is not illuminated by revolutionary theory." One understands therefore why Bolshevism values philosophy: only theory can give "to the movement sureness, capacity for orientation" and demonstrates "not only how and in what direction the classes are moving at the present moment, but also how and in what direction they must move in the near future" (Questions of Leninism, p. 22).

The requirement of the Party spirit goes back to Lenin: "Materialism includes within itself, so to speak, the Party spirit, inasmuch as it obliges us, for every assessment made of an event, to place ourselves directly and openly from the point of view of a certain social group" (Works, 4th ed., I, 386 ff.). This requirement of Lenin is in reality nothing other than a logical deduction from Marx's historical materialism: if one shares his faith that the proletarian class leads society to recovery, it follows evidently that consciousness functions rightly (and philosophy rightly comprehends the real) only when it places itself from the subjective point of view of the proletariat. The objective evolutionary process of the real and the subjective class interest of the proletariat thus come to coincide. With these premises, the further characteristics particularly dominant in the present ideological production of the Soviet Union become immediately comprehensible: struggle against "objectivity", against "servility with respect to bourgeois culture", even the battle for Soviet patriotism and against "cosmopolitanism".

From the concept of philosophy set out above it follows that Soviet theory cannot be thought of as separate from dialectical and historical materialism and that the attempt made by certain theoreticians of the Second International (v. M. STORICO) to build Marxism, as an economic and social doctrine, on another philosophical foundation is inconceivable to it. For this reason, when similar opinions make themselves heard in non-Russian communist circles, they are to be considered from the point of view of Soviet theory as "deviationism" or a tendentious manoeuvre.

III. MATTER

The problem of the essence of matter did not arise, in the time of Marx and Engels, with that urgency with which it has arisen in more recent times. At that time matter was held to be composed of atoms not further divisible, and the nature of the material world seemed perfectly clear and comprehensible. The progress of atomic physics, the discovery that the atom, in turn, is composed of smaller units, produced a great change in this field and provoked a serious crisis for philosophical materialism. Since now even the atom had proved divisible, to many physicists the hypothesis no longer seemed contradictory that, in the process of the subdivision of matter, ultimate boundaries would never be encountered and that, in short, an ultimate constituent of the universe no longer existed; and that indeed one was moving toward the "dissolution of matter," the "dematerialization of the atom."

To save philosophical materialism Lenin distinguishes between the philosophical concept and the scientific concept of matter. The latter would take into consideration the intimate structure of matter, its composition of molecules, atoms, electrons, its properties such as impenetrability, inertia and the like. It is mutable according to the stage of development of science. This, however, does not affect philosophical materialism insofar as it derives from the philosophical concept of matter: "The only property of matter, to whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound, is that of being objective reality and of existing outside our knowledge" (Works, XIV, p. 247). Lenin does not notice that the cited definition does not fit only matter, but any reality, and even a possible spiritual being. Later, however, he defines his philosophical concept univocally, limiting it to material being: matter is "that which, acting on our senses, produces sensation," it is "the objective reality given to us in sensation" (op. cit., p. 133). Lenin's attempt to carry out a philosophical deepening of the concept of matter by means of the distinction between the philosophical concept and the scientific concept of matter itself, while it is to be appreciated, cannot be said to be completely successful. He conceives matter, in fact, from the gnoseological point of view alone, not from the ontological one. Dialectical materialism has not given to date an answer to the fundamental problem, whether matter must, or must not, be conceived as substance. Some propositions of Lenin seem to affirm it, for example, when he holds, against energetism, that movement without a thing that moves is impossible. Elsewhere, however, when he speaks of the "infinity of matter in depth" (Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 112), he seems to admit the possibility that, in the process of the resolution of the atom into ever smaller units, one never reaches an ultimate term, which would certainly be contrary to the substantiality of matter.

Matter, according to the thought of dialectical materialism, is eternal and has been in movement from eternity. Movement is an "attribute of matter," that is, a characteristic inseparable from it that belongs to it necessarily. It is a merit of dialectical materialism in comparison with mechanicism that movement is not understood only in the mechanical sense, but also in the Aristotelian sense, as "mutation," which, therefore, manifests itself in the various orders, in forms essentially and qualitatively different. Heat, light, electricity and magnetism, chemical processes and, finally, even life and consciousness are, already for Engels, different forms of movement. For dialectical materialism every being exists necessarily in space and in time. Space and time are not, however, realities independent of matter, nor do they have a merely subjective meaning, but are modes of existence of matter. Modern Soviet philosophy occupies itself much with the problems raised by atomic physics. In general it assumes, particularly in the face of certain hasty philosophical conclusions of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, a very clear position and in several points an exact one. It energetically defends the universal validity of the principle of causality and the substantial knowability of the whole of reality.

IV. MATERIALIST DIALECTICS

With the term "dialectics" (v.) dialectical materialism designates the evolution that is accomplished through the constitution and the resolution of contraries, of "conflicts." It is contrasted with "metaphysics," understood, with Engels, as the assumption of invariable and stable essences. Hence often "dialectics" means nothing other than "dynamic vision" and not infrequently even "historical" as opposed to "static vision."

In place of Engels's three laws of materialist dialectics, Stalin distinguishes in it four fundamental traits. The first is that all things and phenomena of nature and of society form a unity, "a single coherent whole," "depend on one another and condition one another reciprocally." Therefore individual phenomena can be understood only if they are not considered in isolation, outside the connection with the phenomena that surround them (cf. Quest. del. lenin., p. 581). The second requires considering "nature not as a state of rest and immobility, of stagnation and immutability, but as a state of perpetual movement and change, of incessant renewal and development"; therefore one should always pay the greatest attention to distinguishing between what disappears and what arises; for the dialectical method, in fact, "only what is born and develops" is important and not negligible (ibid., p. 582).

Of greater importance are the remaining two "fundamental traits": the third is the "law of the transition of quantity into quality." This law is the central point of the entire system of dialectical materialism, insofar as it is intended to justify philosophically the qualitative differences, which it affirms in contrast with mechanism, between the different orders of reality and the arising of higher phenomena from lower ones in the course of the evolutionary process. This law affirms that evolution presents itself "as a development that passes from insignificant and latent quantitative changes to open and radical changes, to qualitative changes, a development in which qualitative changes are not produced gradually, but rapidly, suddenly, in leaps from one state to another..." (ibid., p. 582). Evolution is accomplished, that is, first, up to a determinate limit, depending on the nature of the given thing, in the direction of purely quantitative, continuous variations; but if the quantitative variation continues beyond the given limit, there follows a sudden leap of the quantitative variation into qualitative variation; the thing ceases to be what it was and becomes another thing, receives a new "quality." For example, in nature, up to one hundred degrees a pure quantitative increase in the temperature of water takes place; but if the heat is increased beyond that point, the water becomes steam; a qualitative variation supervenes. Analogously in the process of the subdivision of matter: up to the molecule it is a matter of a pure quantitative variation; beyond that, subdivision is possible only by resolving the molecule (e.g., of a chemical compound) into its atoms, with which a qualitative variation supervenes. This law, however, "celebrates" "its greatest triumphs" in the field of chemistry, in which a wholly essential qualitative difference is bound to the pure quantitative variation of the number of atoms combined in a chemical compound (e.g.: N₂O: laughing gas; N₂O₄: nitrous anhydride). According to dialectical materialism, chemical compounds and every qualitative difference in the world arose in an analogous way: when inorganic matter, in a process of pure quantitative variations and consequent qualitative leaps, had reached a sufficiently high stage of internal organization, life emerged from it and, subsequently, through a further evolutionary process, again through a dialectical leap, consciousness.

The fourth trait has the task of explaining the origin of motion, with the principal intent of overcoming the mechanistic conception that holds motion to be possible only through an impulse coming from outside. Such a conception would ultimately lead to the assumption of a "first mover" not itself in need of impulse, that is, to the existence of God, a thing absolutely unthinkable for dialectical materialism. The origin of motion must therefore be placed, according to dialectical materialism, within every phenomenon as the result of internal "conflicts," that is, of real oppositions. "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics starts from the principle that the objects and phenomena of nature imply internal contradictions, since they all have a negative side and a positive side, a past and a future,... and that the struggle between these opposites, between the old and the new, between what is dying and what is being born... is the intimate content of the process of development, the intimate content of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes." (ibid., p. 584). This law — of the unity and struggle of opposites — is nothing other than the extension to all of reality of the dialectical norm originally established by Marx for the sphere of social evolution (class struggles). Stalin speaks here only of the oppositions of old and new in the development of every phenomenon. But on the part of Soviet philosophy, in adherence to the theories of Engels and Lenin, many other pairs of opposites inherent in things are adduced in justification of this law. In the field of physics: the opposition between wave and corpuscle, action and reaction, rest and motion (Engels, with Hegel, saw in simple local motion the "real opposition" constituted by the fact that a body, at a given moment, is and is not at a point), positive and negative electricity, north and south magnetic poles; for chemistry: analysis and synthesis; for biology: life and death; for social doctrine: the struggle between antagonistic classes; in general, in every becoming the synthesis of being and non-being. The existence of such real "oppositions" is therefore the source of every motion and change, which, in this way, assume the character of "Selbstbewegung" in the Hegelian sense. The evolutionary process is a process of continuous mutation, in which there is nothing that remains always equal to itself, nothing fixed, no eternal and immutable substance. Every fixity, everything that essentially remains equal to itself is purely relative, temporary, extends only in the interval between two dialectical "leaps."

Further determinations are offered by the doctrine of the categories. Dialectical materialism preserves the categories of "essence" and "phenomenon," but with "evident discomfort due to its aversion to immutable essences." Essence is what hides within the external appearances of things, their "foundation," their "regular connection," the "intimately contradictory connection," the "universal," the "intimate, necessary connection of things." Phenomenon is instead what is external, the appearance, what is not essential, the single, accidental and external existence of things. On the category of essence rests that of "law," which Lenin defines as "essential phenomenon," image of what is essential in the motion of the universe.

In the evolution of the categories of "possibility" and "reality" Soviet philosophy represents the process of becoming as a passage from possibility to reality, where "reality" is the world as a necessary and intimately conditioned process. Stalin emphasizes the fact that "possibility is not yet reality" (Stalin, Voprosy leninism, 9th ed. [in Russian], p. 548) but, in order to become so, requires, at least in the social field, the conscious intervention of man.

The categories of "necessity" and "chance" concern the problem of determinism and the true character of the necessity that manifests itself in the world. Dialectical materialism rejects absolute determinism (that of mechanism and analogous theories), according to which necessity would extend to the smallest particulars, and counterposes to it a "dialectical" determinism in which the two categories form a dialectical unity, necessity arising from chance. Necessity, regularity, makes its way through an enormous number of chance events in the form of a general tendency, of the average behavior of a mass of deviations from the central axis, and thus has the character of a statistical regularity. It should be noted that dialectical materialism does not intend to break the absolute dominion of the category "necessity" by limiting it with the category "freedom" (freedom, for Engels, is nothing other than "conscious necessity," the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the [necessary] connections) and that for dialectical materialism "chance" does not mean absence of cause: on the contrary, the principle of causality has universal validity. In the domain of nature only causality reigns (and not finality); finality exists only in the field of social evolution. Dialectical materialism attempts a purely causal explanation of the evident finalism inherent in nature by appealing to the Darwinian law of natural selection and of the struggle for survival.

V. THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

As regards the psychology of knowledge, it is a merit of d.m. to have overcome sensualism (v.) and to have defended the essential difference between the "logical" and the sensory degree of knowledge, as already between living and non-living matter. Nevertheless, in the course of the world's evolution, consciousness would have arisen from the development of the nervous activity of organisms, and organic matter from inorganic matter. D.m. rejects spontaneous generation only in the sense that not at every moment, under present environmental conditions, can organic matter be produced from inorganic matter: for this there were needed a span of millions of years and the environmental conditions existing on earth at the time of its cooling. Likewise, other millions of years were needed before the animal psyche reached a development sufficient for the psychic activity of man to arise from it through an abrupt qualitative transition, and for man to begin, in the course of activity directed to the maintenance of life, to employ tools of labor, at which moment alone he truly became man.

Consciousness is therefore not another principle alongside the material one, but a property of matter, acquired as soon as matter reached a sufficiently high degree of internal organization. It is the capacity to "perceive" the objective processes that take place within it, to "mirror them within itself." The physical and the psychic are two aspects of one and the same reality. What, considered from the outside, appears as a physical process (e.g., waves of the ether), is observed, within the same material substance, as a psychic phenomenon of perception (e.g., the color red), or of the will, etc.

This is the first part, in the theory of knowledge, which explains the derivation of consciousness from matter. Second part: consciousness is capable of faithfully expressing the external world. This is affirmed on the basis of the "theory of the image," according to which our perceptions, and also the concepts that result from them, must be considered as "mirrored images," "copies," "reproductions" of the external world. As the world is a process in continuous evolution ("objective dialectic") in which there exist no external and immutable essences, so too our knowledge is also a process, the "subjective dialectic" (image of the objective process) in which likewise there exist no "eternal truths" and ultimate solutions. This process contains two transitions: the first consists in the transformation of the external stimulus into the fact of consciousness of perception; the second in the passage from sensory knowledge to "logical" knowledge in the formation of the concept. With this a qualitative, that is essential, difference is affirmed between sensory knowledge and conceptual knowledge. The concept arises through abstraction of the common and essential elements from sensory perception, which renders only the individual and the external. The elimination of individual and concrete characteristics apparently represents a distancing from the object; in reality, however, abstraction obtains from it a more exact and profound view.

The epistemological criterion of truth is for d.m., already since Marx, praxis. "In praxis man must demonstrate the truth, that is the reality and power, the practicality of his own thought" (Marx on Feuerbach; cf. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, Berlin 1946, p. 54). For Engels, followed here by Lenin, experiment and industry are proof that man is capable of knowing reality correctly. Regarding logic, Soviet philosophers demand, in addition to the restored formal logic, the creation of a "dialectical logic."

VI. "IDEOLOGIES.". — Ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion belong, according to the systematics of Marxism-Leninism, not to d.m., but to historical m. (v.). However, given their generally acknowledged philosophical character and the limits of treatment of the entry HISTORICAL M., some remarks on the matter are indispensable here.

The fundamental concept is that law, philosophy, morality, art, religion, etc., must be considered "ideologies," that is, chiefly of the socio-economic base (v. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM). Marxism-Leninism consequently maintains the mutability of all ethical norms and their dependence on class interests. In class society, the dominant class is always concerned to make its own ethical views universally binding, appealing either to eternal laws and manifestations of divine will (feudalism), or to absolute, ideal, universal ethical laws in the manner of the Kantian categorical imperative (capitalism). For Marxist thought there exist no eternal and immutable ethical norms: "Our morality is, in every respect, subordinate to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat" (Lenin, Works, 3rd ed., XXV, Moscow 1933, p. 391). The first law of such morality is the struggle for the future advent of the communist order. Proletarian virtues are: love for one's own people and for the masses of workers, sense of honor, truthfulness, modesty, courage, comradeship, love of labor, discipline...

Like morality, art too has a class character. It is likewise one of the forms of social consciousness; its task is, analogously to science, to provide a faithful picture of reality, not in the conceptual forms proper to science, but in artistic expression. A true work of art always implies this or that social idea. Therefore art has an important function in the life of society: arisen from it, it reacts upon it in turn, determining man's feelings, thoughts, will, moral principles. The distinctive traits of socialist art should be: socialist popular character, Soviet patriotism, national form, optimism, realism.

Religion is of all ideologies the most devalued; while the other ideological forms of social consciousness are corrupted only in class society, but in classless communist society attain full flowering and complete development, religion is indicated as a form of social consciousness erroneous in itself and for itself and such that, in communism, it must disappear completely. Among all ideologies it is the farthest from the socio-scientific base, whence its fantastic character. Religion "is nothing other than the fantastic reflection in the brains of men of those external forces that dominate their daily existence," a reflection in which the forces of nature come to assume the appearance of "supernatural forces" (Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1946, p. 393). The fantastic character of religion makes it the "opium of the people," inasmuch as, with faith in the afterlife, it enchants the masses with an illusory happiness and in this way leads them astray from the struggle for their real and earthly happiness. Religion thus becomes a particularly suitable instrument for their exploitation.

Therefore communism can assume, with respect to religion, only one position: struggle, which, however, as Lenin admonishes, must not be conducted chiefly with police measures in the manner of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, but by cutting its root with the creation of social conditions that no longer allow it to subsist. Lenin considers valid the formula: religion is a private affair only from the point of view of the State, but not from that of the Party: "The Party cannot be neutral in the face of religion..., because it is for science while religious prejudices are against science..." (Stalin, Works, X, p. 132).

VII. EVALUATION

Despite the positive aspects already noted (overcoming of mechanicism and sensism, epistemological realism), dialectical materialism presents substantial errors and deficiencies. Its fundamental presupposition, that the real is limited to matter in time and space, is an assertion never demonstrated and one that entangles dialectical materialism in continual contradictions. The same must be said of the thesis of the eternity of matter, which is moreover in conflict with the other thesis of ascending evolution.

Absence of a beginning and evolution are irreconcilable, because evolution necessarily presupposes an initial point and a final one. The assertion of the eternity of the world is also in disagreement with physics and astronomy, which not only maintain the existence of a beginning in the evolutionary process of the world, but even speak of a relative "youthfulness" of the universe (ca. 10 billion years).

The central point of the system of dialectical materialism is constituted by the two laws of the passage from quantity to quality and of the unity and conflict of opposites, which are supposed to provide the philosophical justification for the assertion that everything has come to be, in some way, "of itself." Regarding the law of the passage from quantity to quality, it must be observed that it passes over in silence the influence of external causes: an extrinsic cause must act upon the molecule for it to be dissolved into the atoms that compose it, with the acquisition of new essential properties. Furthermore: even if, in certain cases, the arising of new qualities can occur according to the aforementioned law, it is not thereby demonstrated that essentially higher qualities can also be produced in an analogous manner (for example, life, with its evident finality, from blind inorganic matter). The affirmation that the highest forms of reality have arisen "from below," even if by means of the transition of quantity into quality, would be in conflict with the principle of causality, energetically defended by dialectical materialism itself. With regard to the law of unity and conflict as the origin of motion, by which every physical motion becomes Selbstbewegung, it must be said that real contradictions are not involved and cannot be involved, since they are impossible. Most of the examples adduced present, at best, real oppositions. Dialectical materialism here confuses contrary and contradictory; and as for the Hegelian-Engelsian example concerning the contradictory nature of local motion, it must be held that the continuous line does not consist of fixed points: only the line is real, and, respectively, the continuous motion that unfolds upon it (v. MOTO CONTINUO). But even understood in the sense of real contrasts, the law does not explain the origin of motion. Abstracting from unfortunate examples (such as that of the north and south magnetic poles, which in any case is not a source of Selbstbewegung, but, at best, of extrinsic movement), and adhering only to the best example (the contradiction between being and non-being in becoming), here too there is no question of a real contradiction, because a non-being contradictorily opposed to being cannot be real. It is therefore only a question of a real opposition in the ontological constitution of the thing that becomes, which passes from the non-being of possibility to the being of reality. But, as Stalin very rightly emphasizes, possibility is not yet reality, it does not become reality of itself, but requires for this the intervention of an active cause, unless one rejects, once again, the principle of causality. In this sense the ancient principle holds: Quidquid movetur, ab alio movetur (everything that is moved [= changed] is moved [= changed] by something else). The intrinsic "contradictoriness" of being and non-being, in the thing that becomes, does indeed render movement, becoming, intrinsically possible, but it cannot cause it. An "other" is needed to serve as active cause. But if this latter, in turn, is not pure actuality, but becoming or a becoming thing, it too postulates an other than itself. Since the process cannot go on to infinity, one must arrive at a first cause that is not itself become, that does not include an opposition of being and non-being, but is pure being, pure actuality, God.

With regard to the doctrine of the categories, and precisely of the category of "essence," the principal error is the denial of essences fundamentally constant to themselves. A stable essence is not opposed, as dialectical materialism holds, to all becoming and change: accidental mutations can occur in it, or even a profound transformation that entails, in matter, the passage to a new essence (mutatio substantialis). It does not follow that one and the same essence can have these characteristics today and others tomorrow. The concrete bearers of an essence can change into others, but the essence as such, wherever it is realized, can only have those determinate characteristics and not others. Moreover, since essence is understood by dialectical materialism as the totality of the relations between the thing considered and another, the law, as a necessary relation between essences, becomes a relation between relations. Just as essence is mutable, so too, for dialectical materialism, the law is consequently mutable: there is therefore no "eternal" law, everything becomes relative.

This leads to further and fatal consequences with regard to the categories of necessity and chance. Necessity is no longer, in dialectical materialism, a consequence of the relation between immutable essences, but results — in a manner, moreover, that is inexplicable — from chance, as a statistical law. It is therefore not necessity that derives from essence, but essence that results from necessary relations producing themselves of themselves from chance.

With regard to "dialectical determinism," it must be affirmed that it is impossible to delimit determinism by appealing to chance. For even what is chance is causally conditioned and, in this sense, necessary. The necessity of the evolutionary process can be limited only by freedom, but not by a freedom understood as in dialectical materialism, that is, such that it ceases to be freedom insofar as it is "conscious necessity."

Finally, with regard to the categories of causality and finality, the explanation of finalism as an illusion is inconsistent, since a finalism is found, not only in the further development of organisms already constituted, but even more in their original, and indeed primitive, constitution, independently of every struggle for existence, and prior to it.

The epistemological theory of dialectical materialism is also vitiated by substantial errors. In the first place it is a contradiction in terms to ascribe an activity essentially different from material activity to a principle declared to be purely material. With the "image" theory, if epistemological realism is affirmed, it is not critically justified. The problem remains open as to what precisely is the guarantee that our sensations and our concepts are faithful images of reality. The appeal to the parallelism between the two processes of subjective and objective dialectic is of no avail; the process of subjective dialectic could be a "mirroring" of the objective dialectical process only on condition that it ran completely parallel to it in time, which is not the case, given that knowledge is established chronologically much later than the becoming of the real. Nor does it help to appeal to praxis as a criterion of truth; the confirmation of our predictions by praxis may well confirm for us that we can have an exact knowledge of reality, but it does not tell us why this is so and under what conditions it must be so.

From what has been said it follows that the fundamental error of the overall system of d. m. lies in the unjustified unification of matter and dialectic. Dialectic means substantially spirit, the ability to raise oneself above the hic et nunc, above the boundaries of space and time to which matter is always bound; it means an intentional concern for the future. D. m. believes it can guarantee this intentional concern for the future and a regular and reasonable sequence of the evolutionary process, by positing in matter a materialized dialectic tending toward an evolutionistic self-transcendence of matter itself, which overcomes oppositions and "contradiction," from the lowest toward the highest. This is impossible: it is not only the blindly operating negation that ensures, in dialectic, the ascent toward the highest, toward that most endowed with thought, but a reason originally inherent in the process and present to it. The mere blindly operating negation that leads every determinate A to the non-being of non-A is not capable of elevating it to a determinate B in an ascending evolutionary direction, unless the action of negation is itself directed by a spiritual power that stands above the entire process. But in the system of d. m. spiritual activity intervenes only at a very advanced stage of the evolution of matter; consequently the entire process that takes place, with its finalistic pressing upward, should be guided only by the blind action of negation, which is impossible. D. m. ends up foundering at every step of its philosophical elaboration: it wants to derive essence from necessity, rather than the reverse; necessity and regularity from chance, finality from blindly operating causality.

In the concrete and particular elaboration of these assumptions, it becomes evident (what perhaps at first glance does not appear equally clearly) that matter and dialectic, according to a felicitous expression of N. Losskij, separate from one another "like water and oil."

With Promethean pride, d. m. wants to reconcile the irreconcilable, with the principal aim of eluding the recognition of God as first cause and ultimate meaning of the world. But it arrives, in conclusion, at radically subverting the concept of matter and at understanding it as a reality endowed with spiritual, indeed even divine and creative, forces.

Gustavo A. Wetter