Law of the Negation of the Negation

Also known as “law of affirmation and negation”. One of the basic laws of materialist dialectics. It reveals that the dialectical negation of things is not done at once, but goes through a law-governed process of two negations and three stages in which things develop themselves. The three-stage evolution of “affirmation—negation—negation of the negation” is the transformation of each aspect of the contradiction of a thing into its opposite, a comprehensive, all-inclusive process, in which the contradiction unfolds itself. Each stage in the development of things is a negation of the previous stage, which is again negated by the latter stage. Undergoing negation of the negation, the motion of things manifests itself as a cycle, often repeating certain features, properties of the old affirmative stage. Lenin pointed out that a development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line. This constitutes the process of development of things moving upward in twists and turns from simple to complex, from the lower to the higher. Such a cyclical spiral-like development is the fundamental characteristic of the law of the negation of the negation.

The law of the negation of the negation reveals the dialectical unity of progress and twists and turns in the process of development of things. Progress is embodied in that every negation is a qualitative change, a unity of negation and affirmation, and pushes things to a new stage; each cycle is open, the end of the previous cycle is the beginning of the next cycle, there is no end that is not negated. Twists and turns are embodied in the return, in which there is a temporary pause or retrogression, but which, passing the twists and turns, will eventually open up the path for the development of things. The law of the negation of the negation reveals that, driven by the intrinsic contradictoriness or the intrinsic negative force, an existing thing transforms into its opposite, moving from affirmation to negation of itself, and then from negation to a new affirmation, i.e., negation of the negation, thus showing a complete process in which the thing develops itself.

The principle of law of the negation of the negation requires people to see not only the twists and turns in the path of development of things, but also the progress in the direction of development of things. To use the law of the negation of the negation in practical activity, we should, on the one hand, prevent the straight-line thinking that ignores the twists and turns in the path of development of things and regards the development of things as a smooth sailing; on the other hand, we should prevent the pessimistic and circular thinking that ignores the progress in the direction of development of things and only sees the twists and turns, or holds that the development of things “goes round in circles”.