DIALETTICAL MATERIALISM. - Dialectical materialism is a form of materialism that asserts, in contrast to mechanistic materialism, the specific difference between the higher spheres of reality (life, consciousness) and the lower ones (physical and chemical phenomena), as well as the formal impossibility of reducing the former to the latter. Nevertheless, as a form of materialism, it maintains the derivation of the higher from the lower. The philosophical justification for the derivation of higher phenomena from lower ones in the course of the evolutionary process is purportedly provided by the adoption and materialist "inversion" of Hegelian dialectics. Dialectical materialism is the official Weltanschauung of the Soviet state and the philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism.
I. HISTORICAL NOTES
Given that Marx contributed to the materialistic inversion of Hegel undertaken by Feuerbach and considered Nature (and man as part of it) as primary reality and spirit as derivative, while at the same time preserving the Hegelian legacy of dialectics, he may be regarded as the father of dialectical materialism (v. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM). However, those who expect to find in Marx’s philosophical writings (belonging to his early period) the individual theses as formulated in today’s system of dialectical materialism would be disappointed.The true creator of the system must be considered Engels, who extended the unification of materialism and dialectics, accomplished by Marx in the historical field, to Nature and, with this, to all reality. He also formulated the three "laws of dialectical materialism": the law of the transition from quantity to quality, the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and the law of the negation of the negation; and he laid the foundation of the gnoseological theory of dialectical materialism, the so-called "theory of the image." Lenin adopted dialectical materialism in its Engelsian form and defended it against revisionism, particularly against the Russian variety. After his death, in the Soviet Union, there was initially a resurgence of mechanism (v.), which sought to reduce all higher phenomena simply to physico-chemical laws and often even denied the right of existence to any philosophy, intending to replace it with the "latest conclusions of science." However, from 1925 onward, especially due to the dissemination of Engels’ fragments on the "dialectics of nature" and the influence of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow 1933), an opposing view began to emerge, growing ever stronger and, under the leadership of A. M. Deborin, vigorously defending dialectical materialism.
The struggle between the two tendencies raged violently until 1931 and ended, in fact, with the condemnation of both currents by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. (25 January 1931). Mechanism was condemned as the philosophical basis of "right deviationism" (opposition to the forced collectivization of the countryside; V. BOLSHEVISM); Deborinism, branded as "Menshevik idealism," as the philosophical basis of "left deviationism" (Trotskyism). The new philosophical current that emerged, in which M. Mitin particularly stood out, was obliged to adhere most strictly to the Party’s political struggle; the primary duty of Soviet philosophy was to support the Party in its fight against right and left deviations and to wage a two-front battle in the philosophical field against mechanism and Menshevik idealism. After this, the most significant event in the life of Soviet philosophy was the publication of the History of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the Soviet Union, a short manual containing a 27-page chapter personally written by Stalin: On Dialectical and Historical Materialism, which provides a dense exposition of the main theses of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and social doctrine and which, today, is considered in the communist world the most decisive philosophical work in history, one that "elevates dialectical materialism to a new, higher level and represents the true apex of Marxist-Leninist philosophical thought." In terms of content, however, this work offers nothing new compared to Engels and Lenin.
A considerable resurgence 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 dialectical materialism, but rather as a quantitative increase in philosophical production. Decisive in this regard was the Philosophical Discussion of June 1947, in which, at the initiative of the Party’s Central Committee, the History of Western European Philosophy by G. E. Aleksandrov, previously awarded the Stalin Prize, was criticized, particularly by Zdanov. Aleksandrov’s errors, like those of all "philosophical workers," consisted mainly in "formal objectivity," that is, in the fact that he treated opponents too courteously and subjected their systems to insufficiently passionate criticism; in the lack of partisan combativeness; in a servile attitude toward bourgeois culture, and the like. Similar attacks by the Party’s highest leadership body have been recorded in recent years (v. BOLSHEVISM) in other fields of ideological work: specifically, in biology (v. MICHURIN), and linguistics ("discussion" of July 1950, with Stalin’s personal intervention, in which N. J. Marr [1884-1934], the hitherto unchallenged authority of Soviet linguistics, was demolished). The 1947 philosophical discussion gave rise to the quarterly journal Problems of Philosophy.
In the following columns, dialectical materialism will be presented in its Soviet formulation, which represents the obligatory and fundamental Weltanschauung of global communism. Outside the Soviet Union, other forms of this philosophy exist within the communist sphere, which, however, more or less constitute personal systems (e.g., Max Raphael, H. Lefebvre, Banfi, the recent philosophical group expressed in Italy in the journal Il costume) and would be considered by official Soviet philosophy as idealistic deviations.
II. CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY
The struggle against mechanism has led to the conviction that philosophy must be recognized as having the right to exist as an independent science, alongside other sciences. It constitutes the foundation upon which the individual sciences can alone be developed, resolving the problem of the specific object with which each science is concerned: a world that exists independently of the thinking subject or the products of thought. Philosophy must therefore be considered not merely as pure methodology, but also as a Weltanschauung, as a theory of the real.From this arises the problem of the relationship between philosophy and science. For dialectical materialism, the object of philosophy is "the general laws of motion and evolution of Nature, human society, and thought" (Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1946, p. 173), that is, above all, the most general laws of reality; whereas each particular science considers the laws and structure of a specific section of reality. While in Engels there was a tendency to limit the object of philosophy by increasingly separating fields reserved for particular sciences, in contemporary Soviet philosophy one can observe the opposite tendency to restore the rights of disciplines expelled by Engels from the domain of philosophy. New sections have emerged within the Philosophical Institute of the U.S.S.R.: logic, philosophy of natural sciences, psychology; the establishment of special chairs in aesthetics and pedagogy within Faculties of Philosophy is demanded; great attention is devoted to problems of ethics, etc.
The particular character of Soviet philosophy is best revealed in its method, through two principles that confer upon it a distinctive aspect: the demand for the unity of theory and praxis, and that of "Party spirit" in philosophical work. The unity of theory and praxis arises automatically from the Marxist concept of "praxis" (v. M. STORICO), which is nothing other than an extension of philosophy into practical activity, the "realization" of philosophy. "Theory," says Stalin, "becomes devoid of object if it is not linked to revolutionary practice, just as practice becomes blind if it does not illuminate its path with revolutionary theory." It is therefore understandable why Bolshevism values philosophy: only theory can provide "the movement with certainty, the capacity for orientation," and demonstrate "not only how and in what direction 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 demand for Party spirit dates back to Lenin: "Materialism includes within itself, so to speak, the spirit of party, in that it obliges us, in every evaluation of an event, to place ourselves directly and openly from the standpoint of a certain social group" (Works, 4th ed., I, 386 ff.). This demand 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 toward healing, it evidently follows that consciousness functions correctly (and philosophy correctly comprehends the real) only when it adopts the subjective standpoint 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 current ideological production of the Soviet Union become entirely comprehensible: the struggle against "objectivity," against "servility toward bourgeois culture," even the battle for Soviet patriotism and against "cosmopolitanism."
From the outlined concept of philosophy, it follows that Soviet theory cannot be conceived as separate from dialectical and historical materialism, nor is it conceivable to attempt, as certain theorists of the Second International (v. M. STORICO) did, to construct Marxism as an economic and social doctrine upon a different philosophical foundation. For this reason, when such opinions emerge within the non-Russian communist sphere, they are considered from the standpoint of Soviet theory as "deviationism" or a tendentious maneuver.
III. MATTER
The problem of the essence of matter was not posed, in the time of Marx and Engels, with the urgency it has assumed in more recent times. At that time, matter was believed to be composed of atoms that could not be further divided, and the nature of the material world seemed perfectly clear and comprehensible. The progress of atomic physics, the discovery that the atom itself is composed of smaller units, produced a great change in this field and provoked a serious crisis for philosophical materialism. Since even the atom had now proven divisible, many physicists found it plausible to hypothesize that, in the process of subdividing matter, no ultimate boundaries would ever be encountered, and that, in short, there no longer existed a final constituent of the universe; indeed, one was moving toward the "dissolution of matter," the "dematerialization of the atom."To salvage philosophical materialism, Lenin distinguishes between the philosophical concept and the scientific concept of matter. The latter takes into account 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 scientific development. 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 existing outside our knowledge" (Works, XIV, p. 247). Lenin does not notice that the cited definition applies not only to matter but to any reality, even to a possible spiritual being. Later, however, he defines his philosophical concept unequivocally, limiting it to material being: matter is "that which, acting on our senses, produces sensation," it is "objective reality, given to us in sensation" (op. cit., p. 133). Lenin's attempt to deepen philosophically the concept of matter by distinguishing between the philosophical and scientific concepts of matter itself, while commendable, cannot be considered entirely successful. He conceives matter solely from a gnoseological, not an ontological, perspective. Dialectical materialism has not yet provided an answer to the fundamental question of whether matter should, or should not, be conceived as substance. Some of Lenin's propositions seem to affirm it, for example, when he considers, against energeticism, that movement is impossible without a thing that moves. 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 resolving the atom into ever smaller units, no ultimate term is ever reached, which would certainly be contrary to the substantiality of matter.
According to dialectical materialism, matter is eternal and has been in motion from eternity. Movement is an "attribute of matter," that is, a characteristic inseparable from it and necessarily belonging to II. A merit of dialectical materialism compared to mechanism is that movement is not understood only in a mechanical sense but also in an Aristotelian sense, as "change," which thus manifests itself in various orders, in essentially and qualitatively different forms. 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 necessarily exists in space and 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 devotes much attention to the problems raised by atomic physics. In general, it takes a very clear and in many respects correct position, particularly in response to certain hasty philosophical conclusions drawn from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It vigorously defends the universal validity of the principle of causality and the substantial knowability of the entire reality.
IV. MATERIALIST DIALECTICS
With the term "dialectics" (v.) dialectical materialism designates the evolution that occurs through the constitution and resolution of opposites, of "conflicts." It is contrasted with "metaphysics," understood, with Engels, as the assumption of invariable and stable essences. Thus, "dialectics" often means nothing more than a "dynamic vision" and not infrequently even a "historical" one, in contrast to a "static" vision.In place of Engels' three laws of materialist dialectics, Stalin distinguishes four fundamental traits within II. The first is that all things and phenomena of nature and society form a unity, "a single coherent whole," "depending on one another and conditioning each other reciprocally." Therefore, individual phenomena can be understood only if they are not considered in isolation, outside the connection with the surrounding phenomena (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"; thus, one should always pay the utmost attention to distinguishing between what disappears and what arises; for the dialectical method, indeed, 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 aims to philosophically justify the qualitative differences, affirmed in contrast to mechanism, between the various orders of reality and the emergence of higher phenomena from lower ones in the course of the evolutionary process. This law states 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 do not occur gradually, but rapidly, suddenly, in leaps from one state to another..." (ibid., p. 582). Evolution thus proceeds, first, up to a certain limit, dependent 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, a sudden leap follows from quantitative variation to qualitative variation; the thing ceases to be what it was and becomes another thing, acquiring a new "quality." For example, in nature, up to one hundred degrees, there occurs a purely quantitative increase in the temperature of water; but if heat is increased beyond that point, water becomes vapor; a qualitative change occurs. Similarly, in the process of subdivision of matter: up to the molecule, it is a purely quantitative variation; further on, subdivision is possible only by resolving the molecule (e.g., of a chemical compound) into its atoms, with which a qualitative change occurs. This law, however, "celebrates its greatest triumphs" in the field of chemistry, in which the purely quantitative variation in the number of atoms combined in a chemical compound is linked to an entirely essential qualitative difference (e.g., N₂O: laughing gas; N₂O₄: nitrogen tetroxide). According to dialectical materialism, chemical compounds and every qualitative difference in the world arose in an analogous manner: when inorganic matter, in a process of purely quantitative variations and consequent qualitative leaps, reached a sufficiently high stage of internal organization, life emerged from it and, subsequently, through a further evolutionary process, still through a dialectical leap, consciousness.
The fourth trait has the task of explaining the origin of motion, with the principal aim of overcoming the mechanistic conception that holds motion to be possible only through an impulse coming from the outside. Such a conception would ultimately lead to the assumption of a "prime mover" itself in no need of impulse, that is, to the existence of God, something absolutely unthinkable for dialectical materialism. The origin of motion must therefore be placed, according to dialectical materialism, within every phenomenon as the resultant of internal "conflicts," that is, of real oppositions. "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics proceeds from the principle that the objects and phenomena of nature imply internal contradictions, since they all have a negative 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 inner content of the process of development, the inner content of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes" (ibid., p. 584). This law—the unity and struggle of opposites—is nothing but the extension to all reality of the dialectical norm originally established by Marx for the sphere of social evolution (class struggles). Stalin speaks here only of the oppositions between old and new in the development of every phenomenon. But Soviet philosophy, in adherence to the theories of Engels and Lenin, adduces many other pairs of opposites inherent in things to justify 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 in 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 "oppositions" is thus the source of all 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 nothing remains always equal to itself, nothing is fixed, no eternal and immutable substance exists. Every fixity, everything that essentially remains equal to itself is purely relative, temporary, extending only in the interval between two dialectical "leaps."
Further determinations are offered by the doctrine of categories. Dialectical materialism retains the categories of "essence" and "phenomenon," but with "evident discomfort due to aversion to immutable essences." Essence is what is hidden within the external appearances of things, their "foundation," their "regular connection," the "intimately contradictory connection," the "universal," the "intimate, necessary connection of things." Phenomenon, on the other hand, is what is external, appearance, what is not essential, the singular, accidental, and external existence of things. Upon the category of essence rests that of "law," which Lenin defines as "essential phenomenon," an 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 that "possibility is not yet reality" (Stalin, Voprosy leninizma, 9th ed. [in Russian], p. 548) but, 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 necessity as it manifests in the world. Dialectical materialism rejects absolute determinism (of mechanism and analogous theories), according to which necessity would extend to the smallest particulars, and opposes it with a "dialectical" determinism in which the two categories form a dialectical unity, with necessity arising from chance. Necessity, regularity, makes its way through an enormous number of chance events in the form of a general tendency, an average behavior of a mass of deviations from the central axis, and thus possesses 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" (for Engels, freedom 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 holds universal value. In the domain of nature, only causality (and not finality) reigns; finality exists only in the field of social evolution. Dialectical materialism attempts to explain the evident finalism inherent in nature through a purely causal explanation, invoking Darwin's law of natural selection and the struggle for survival.
V. KNOWLEDGE
As regards the psychology of knowledge, the merit of dialectical sensism (v.) and in defending the essential difference between the "logical" and the sensory levels of knowledge, just as there is a difference between living and non-living matter. However, 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. Dialectical materialism rejects spontaneous generation only in the sense that, under current environmental conditions, organic matter cannot arise from inorganic matter at any given moment: this required millions of years and the environmental conditions existing on Earth during its cooling phase. Likewise, millions more years were needed until animal psyche reached a sufficient level of development so that, through a sudden qualitative leap, human psychic activity could emerge from it, and man began, in the course of activities aimed at sustaining life, to employ tools of labor, at which point alone he truly became man.
Consciousness is therefore not another principle alongside the material one, but rather 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 occurring within it, to "reflect them within itself." The physical and the psychic are two aspects of one and the same reality. What, when considered from the outside, appears as a physical process (e.g., ether waves), is observed, within the same material substance, as a psychic phenomenon of perception (e.g., the color red), or of will, etc.
This is the first part of 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 even the concepts derived from them, must be considered as "mirrored images," "copies," "reproductions" of the external world. Just as the world is a process in continuous evolution ("objective dialectics"), in which no external and immutable essences exist, so too our knowledge is also a process, the "subjective dialectics" (an image of the objective process), in which there are no "eternal truths" or 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. This affirms a qualitative, that is, essential, difference between sensory knowledge and conceptual knowledge. The concept arises through the abstraction of common and essential elements from sensory perception, which only captures the singular and the external. The elimination of individual and concrete characteristics apparently represents a distancing from the object; in reality, however, abstraction obtains a more exact and profound view of II.
The gnoseological criterion of truth for dialectical materialism, already from Marx, is praxis. "In praxis, man must demonstrate the truth, that is, the reality and the power, the practicality of his 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 correctly knowing reality. Regarding logic, Soviet philosophers demand, in addition to the restored formal logic, the creation of a "dialectical logic."
VI. THE "IDEOLOGIES"
Ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion belong, according to the systematics of Marxism-Leninism, not to dialectical materialism, historical materialism (v.). However, given their generally acknowledged philosophical character and the limits of the entry on HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, some remarks on the subject are indispensable here.
The fundamental concept is that law, philosophy, morality, art, religion, etc., must be considered "ideologies," that is, superstructures of the social-economic base (v. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM). Marxism-Leninism consequently asserts the mutability of all ethical norms and their dependence on class interests. In class society, the dominant class is always concerned with making its own ethical views universally binding, appealing either to eternal laws and manifestations of divine will (feudalism) or to absolute, ideal, universal ethical laws, such as Kant's categorical imperative (capitalism). For Marxist thought, there are no eternal and immutable ethical norms: "Our morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat" (Lenin, Works, 3rd ed., XXV, Moscow 1933, p. 391). The primary law of such morality is the struggle for the future advent of the communist order. Proletarian virtues are: love for one's people and for the masses of workers, sense of honor, truthfulness, decency, courage, camaraderie, love of labor, discipline...
Like morality, art also has a class character. It, too, is one of the forms of social consciousness; its task, analogous to that of science, is 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: born from it, it in turn reacts upon it, shaping the feelings, thoughts, will, and moral principles of man. The distinctive features of socialist art should be: socialist popular character, Soviet patriotism, national form, optimism, realism.
Religion is the most devalued of all ideologies; while the other ideological forms of social consciousness are only vitiated in class society but reach full flourishing and complete development in the classless communist society, religion is indicated as a form of social consciousness erroneous in itself and such that, in communism, it must disappear completely. Among all ideologies, it is the farthest from the social-scientific base, hence its fantastic character. Religion "is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces that dominate their daily existence," a reflection in which the forces of nature take on the appearance of "supernatural forces" (Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1946, p. 393). The fantastic character of religion makes it the "opium of the people," as, with faith in the hereafter, it enchants the masses with an illusory happiness and thus diverts them from the struggle for their real and earthly happiness. Religion thus becomes a particularly suitable instrument for their exploitation.
For this reason, communism can assume only one position with respect to religion: struggle, which, however, as Lenin warns, must not be conducted primarily with police measures in the manner of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, but by cutting off its root through the creation of social conditions that no longer allow it to exist. Lenin considers the formula "religion is a private matter" valid only from the point of view of the State, but not from that of the Party: "The Party cannot be neutral with regard to religion..., because it stands for science while religious prejudices are against science..." (Stalin, Works, X, p. 132).
BIBL.:
For the theory of knowledge: F. ENGELS, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, Berlin 1946; V. LENIN, Materialismo ed empiriocriticismo, Roma 1946; A. SCHAFF, Introduzione alla semantica, Roma 1962; for the ideologies: K. MARX - F. ENGELS, L'ideologia tedesca, Roma 1958; V. LENIN, Opere, 3ª ed., XXV, Moscow 1933; I. STALIN, Opere, X, Rome 1952; F. ENGELS, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1946; G. LUKÁCS, Storia e coscienza di classe, Milan 1967; A. GRAMSCI, Quaderni del carcere, Turin 1948-1951.
A. M.
VII. EVALUATION
Despite the positive aspects already noted (the overcoming of mechanism and sensism, epistemological realism), dialectical materialism presents substantial errors and deficiencies. Its fundamental presupposition—that reality 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, moreover, stands in contrast with the other thesis of ascending evolution.The absence of a beginning and evolution are irreconcilable because evolution necessarily presupposes an initial and a final point. The assertion of the eternity of the world is also at odds with physics and astronomy, which not only affirm the existence of a beginning in the evolutionary process of the world but even speak of a relative "youth" of the universe (approximately 10 billion years).
The central point of the dialectical materialist system consists of the two laws of the transition from quantity to quality and of the unity and conflict of opposites, which should provide the philosophical justification for the assertion that everything has somehow "come into being of itself." Regarding the law of the transition from quantity to quality, it must be observed that it overlooks the influence of external causes: a molecule must be acted upon by an extrinsic cause to be dissolved into the atoms that compose it, thereby acquiring new essential properties. Furthermore, even if, in certain cases, the emergence of new qualities may occur according to the aforementioned law, it is not thereby demonstrated that even essentially higher qualities can be produced in an analogous manner (e.g., life, with its evident finality, from blind inorganic matter). The assertion that the highest forms of reality have arisen "from below," even if through the transition of quantity into quality, would conflict with the principle of causality, which dialectical materialism itself vigorously defends. Concerning the law of unity and conflict as the origin of motion, according to which every physical motion becomes Selbstbewegung, it must be said that these are not, nor can they be, real contradictions, which are impossible. Most of the examples adduced present, at best, real oppositions. Here, dialectical materialism confuses the contrary with the contradictory; and as for the Hegelian-Engelsian example of the contradictoriness of local motion, it must be held that a continuous line does not consist of fixed points: only the line itself, and, respectively, the continuous motion that unfolds upon it, are real (v. CONTINUO). But even understood in the sense of real oppositions, the law does not explain the origin of motion. Setting aside unfortunate examples (such as that of the north and south magnetic poles, which in any case are not a source of Selbstbewegung but, at best, of extrinsic motion), and adhering only to the best example (the contradiction between being and non-being in becoming), even here there is no real contradiction because a non-being contradictorily opposed to being cannot be real. It is therefore only 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 rightly emphasizes, possibility is not yet reality, does not become reality of itself, but requires for this the intervention of an active cause, unless one again rejects the principle of causality. In this sense, the ancient principle Quidquid movetur, ab alio movetur holds true. The intrinsic "contradiction" of being and non-being in the thing that becomes indeed renders motion and becoming intrinsically possible, but it cannot cause them. An "other" is needed to act as an active cause. But if this cause, in turn, is not pure actuality but becoming or in the process of becoming, it too postulates another beyond itself. Since the process cannot regress infinitely, one must arrive at a first cause that is not itself become, does not include the opposition of being and non-being, but is pure being, pure actuality—God.
Regarding the doctrine of categories, and specifically the category of "essence," the principal error lies in the denial of essences fundamentally constant in themselves. A stable essence does not oppose, as dialectical materialism holds, all becoming and change: accidental mutations may occur within it, or even a profound transformation that entails, in matter, the passage to a new essence (mutatio substantialis). It does not follow that the same essence can have one set of characteristics today and another tomorrow. The concrete bearers of an essence may change into others, but the essence as such, wherever it is realized, can only have those determined characteristics and no others. Furthermore, since essence is understood by dialectical materialism as the totality of relations between the thing considered and another, the law, as a necessary relation between essences, becomes a relation between relations. As essence is mutable, so too, for dialectical materialism, is the law consequently mutable: there is thus no "eternal" law, everything becomes relative.
This leads to further and fatal consequences regarding the categories of necessity and chance. Necessity is no longer, in dialectical materialism, the consequence of the relation between immutable essences but results—inexplicably—from chance, as a statistical law. It is not necessity that derives from essence, but essence that results from necessary relations arising of themselves from chance.
Regarding "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 only be limited by freedom, but not by a freedom understood as in dialectical materialism, that is, one that ceases to be freedom insofar as it is "conscious necessity."
Finally, concerning the categories of causality and finality, the explanation of finalism as an illusion is untenable, since finalism is encountered not only in the further development of already constituted organisms but even more in their original, and even primitive, constitution, independently of any struggle for existence and prior to II.
The epistemological theory of dialectical materialism is also marred by substantial errors. First, it is a contradiction to ascribe an activity essentially different from the material to a principle declared purely material. With the theory of the "image," if epistemological realism is affirmed, it is not critically justified. The question remains as to what precisely guarantees that our sensations and concepts are faithful images of reality. The appeal to the parallelism between the two processes of subjective and objective dialectics is of no avail; the process of subjective dialectics could be a "reflection" of the objective dialectical process only on the condition that it ran completely parallel to it in time, which it does not, given that knowledge arises chronologically much later than the becoming of the real. Nor is it helpful to appeal to practice as a criterion of truth; the confirmation of our predictions by practice may well confirm that we can have an exact knowledge of reality, but it does not tell us why this is so or under what conditions it must be so.
From the foregoing, it follows that the fundamental error of the entire system of dialectical materialism lies in the unjustified unification of matter and dialectic. Dialectic essentially signifies spirit, the capacity to rise above the hic et nunc, above the boundaries of space and time to which matter is always confined; it signifies an intentional preoccupation with the future. Dialectical materialism believes it can guarantee this intentional preoccupation with the future and a regular, rational sequence of the evolutionary process by positing within matter a materialized dialectic tending toward an evolutionary self-transcendence of matter itself, which overcomes oppositions and "contradictions," moving from the lower to the higher. This is impossible: it is not merely blindly operating negation that ensures, in dialectic, the ascent toward the higher, toward the more endowed with thought, but a reason originally inherent in the process and present within II. The mere blindly operating negation that reduces every determined A to the non-being of non-A is incapable of elevating it to a determined B in an ascending evolutionary direction, unless the action of negation itself is directed by a spiritual power standing above the entire process. Yet in the system of dialectical materialism, spiritual activity intervenes only at a very advanced stage of the evolution of matter; consequently, the entire process that takes place, with its teleological drive toward the heights, should be guided solely by the blind action of negation, which is impossible. Dialectical materialism founders at every step of its philosophical elaboration: it seeks 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, what perhaps does not appear equally clear at first glance becomes evident: matter and dialectic, according to a felicitous expression by N. Losskij, separate from one another "like water and oil."
With Promethean pride, dialectical materialism seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable, with the primary intent of evading the recognition of God as the first cause and ultimate meaning of the world. But it ultimately arrives at radically subverting the concept of matter, understanding it as a reality endowed with spiritual, indeed even divine and creative, forces.