Dialectics of Nature

Marxist science on the general laws of the development of nature and of natural science; the science which provides mankind with the general methods and laws to know and change nature.

Since modern times, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, tremendous achievements were made in the development of natural sciences in terms of knowledge and systematizing materials. However, due to the influence of mechanism, the research and processing of these materials was in a static and isolated state, and was still inferior to the ancient Greek naïve dialectical philosophy in terms of the general the conception of nature. Ancient Greek philosophers regarded the world as something engendered from chaos and in eternal motion, change and development, being a spontaneous and naïve dialectical conception of nature, while the modern natural scientists regarded the world as something rigid and unchanging, being a metaphysical conception of nature. The classical German philosophy of nature represented by Hegel put forth many reasonable ideas, but they were of speculative and idealist nature. The founding of the dialectics of nature by Engels and Marx was to draw the laws of dialectics from the nature itself and to elucidate them according to the nature and state of development of the nature itself. From the early 1870s to the mid-1880s, Engels systematically studied the latest achievements in the development of natural sciences at that time, especially made a scientific summation and conclusion of the three major discoveries in natural sciences, the law of conservation and transformation of energy, the cell theory and Darwin’s theory of evolution, wrote works such as Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring and established the ideological system of dialectics of nature. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, against the background of the new development of natural science, Lenin wrote works such as Materialism and Empirio-criticism, On the Significance of Militant Materialism, and further enriched and developed the dialectics of nature. Philosophers such as Mao Zedong and a number of natural scientists have also made important contributions to the development of the dialectics of nature.

Dialectics of nature emphasizes that “our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought, we should consciously apply this principle as the unconditional premise of our theoretical thinking”. The main contents of the dialectics of nature include: First, dialectics of nature, i.e., the dialectical conception of nature. The development of nature follows the law of its own dialectical motion. By constantly summarizing and refining the latest achievements of natural sciences, dialectics of nature reveals the rich and diverse dialectical laws of nature and their forms of appearance, and studies the dialectical process of the development of nature from the lower to the higher, the conception of matter, the conception of motion, and the conception of space and time, so as to raise the dialectical materialist conception of nature to a level appropriate to the level of development of modern natural science. Second, the dialectics of natural sciences, i.e., the conception of natural sciences, the study of the nature, characteristics, social attributes and laws of development of natural science according to the history and status quo of the development of natural science, and the summation of the conception of natural sciences. Third, the dialectics of natural science research, i.e., the epistemology and methodology of natural science, the study of the concrete application of general philosophical, logical and mathematical methods and other dialectical methods to natural science research, the investigation of the methods of experimental knowledge and the methods of theoretical thinking of natural science, and ensuring the correctness and scientificity of natural science research. Dialectics of nature also studies the basic concepts and fundamental principles of various natural sciences, such as philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of astronomy, philosophy of physics, philosophy of technology etc., and the dialectical relation between the philosophy of natural science and other social phenomena such as economy, politics, military affairs, culture, etc.

Dialectics of nature is an important component part of Marxist philosophy. It provided the concrete world outlook and methodological guidance for various concrete sciences. It also provided theoretical proof for Marxist philosophy, provided natural science ground, enriched philosophical categories, and perfected philosophical theories and has the methodological significance of connecting philosophy with natural science.