Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the world outlook and method of thinking opposite to dialectics. The term metaphysics originated from the Latin word metaphysica, originally meaning “after physics”, which refers to the doctrine that studies supra-empirical objects beyond the tangible. The classical German philosopher Hegel used the term “metaphysics” to refer to the method of thinking opposite to dialectics and gave it a new meaning. The term “metaphysics” as used in Marxist philosophy usually has the latter meaning. Mao Zedong said: “Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical conception and the dialectical conception, which form two opposing world outlooks.”

Metaphysics regards the world from an isolated, static, one-sided point of view. Metaphysical ideas arose in ancient times. Natural sciences, which arose in Europe in the second half of the 15th century, decomposed nature into various parts and conducted research on various natural processes and natural objects in separate categories. Such a method of inquiry overcame the defects of contemplation in general of the previous knowledge of the world and became the basic condition for mankind to make a huge progress in the knowledge of nature, but it also formed an isolated and static mode of examining questions. This mode of examination was transplanted from natural science to philosophy by the British philosophers Bacon and Locke, forming the metaphysical method of thinking. “In the contemplation of individual things [metaphysics] forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their movement. It cannot see the wood for the trees.”

In the history of philosophy metaphysics has sometimes been combined with materialism and sometimes with idealism. Materialism of the 18th and 19th centuries had mechanistic and metaphysical characteristics, which was inevitable under the historical conditions at that time. In the 19th century, when the natural science developed from being predominantly a collecting science to a predominantly systematizing science, the conditions were created for dialectics to overcome metaphysics. Under the new historical conditions of the development of capitalist mechanical industry, changes in class relations and the development of natural sciences, Marx and Engels achieved a double criticism and a double transcendence of both idealism and metaphysics, and combined materialism with dialectics, thus founded the scientific world outlook and method of thinking of dialectical materialism.