Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of
science and nature developed in Europe and
based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels.Dialectical materialism adapts the
Hegelian dialectic for traditional materialism,
which examines the subjects of the world in
relation to each other within a dynamic, evolutionary
environment, in contrast to metaphysical materialism,
which examines parts of the world within a
static, isolated environment.
Dialectical materialism accepts the evolution
of the natural world and the emergence of
new qualities of being at new stages of evolution.
As Z. A. Jordan notes, "Engels made constant
use of the metaphysical insight that the higher
level of existence emerges from and has its
roots in the lower; that the higher level
constitutes a new order of being with its
irreducible laws; and that this process of
evolutionary advance is governed by laws of
development which reflect basic properties
of 'matter in motion as a whole'."The formulation
of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical
materialism (such as in Stalin's book Dialectical
and Historical Materialism) in the 1930s by
Joseph Stalin and his associates, became the
"official" Soviet interpretation of Marxism.
It was codified and popularized in textbooks
which were required reading in the Soviet
Union as well as in some Eastern European
countries. It was exported to China as the
"official" interpretation of Marxism.
== The term ==
Marx and Engels never used the words "dialectical
materialism" in their own writings. The term
was coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist
who corresponded with Marx, during and after
the failed 1848 German Revolution. Casual
mention of the term "dialectical materialism"
is also found in the biography Frederick Engels,
by philosopher Karl Kautsky, written in the
same year. Marx himself had talked about the
"materialist conception of history", which
was later referred to as "historical materialism"
by Engels. Engels further explained the "materialist
dialectic" in his Dialectics of Nature in
1883. Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian
Marxism, later introduced the term "dialectical
materialism" to Marxist literature. Joseph
Stalin further delineated and defined dialectical
and historical materialism as the world outlook
of Marxism-Leninism, and as a method to study
society and its history.
== Historical background ==
Marx and Engels each began their adulthood
as Young Hegelians, one of several groups
of intellectuals inspired by the philosopher
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx's doctoral
thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, was concerned
with the atomism of Epicurus and Democritus,
which is considered the foundation of materialist
philosophy. Marx was also familiar with Lucretius's
theory of clinamen. Marx and Engels both concluded
that Hegelian philosophy, at least as interpreted
by their former colleagues, was too abstract
and was being misapplied in attempts to explain
the social injustice in recently industrializing
countries such as Germany, France, and the
United Kingdom, which was a growing concern
in the early 1840s.In contrast to the conventional
Hegelian dialectic of the day, which emphasized
the idealist observation that human experience
is dependent on the mind's perceptions, Marx
developed Marxist dialectics, which emphasized
the materialist view that the world of the
concrete shapes socioeconomic interactions
and that those in turn determine sociopolitical
reality. Whereas some Hegelians blamed religious
alienation (estrangement from the traditional
comforts of religion) for societal ills, Marx
and Engels concluded that alienation from
economic and political autonomy, coupled with
exploitation and poverty, was the real culprit.
In keeping with dialectical ideas, Marx and
Engels thus created an alternative theory,
not only of why the world is the way it is
but also of which actions people should take
to make it the way it ought to be. In Theses
on Feuerbach (1845), Marx wrote, "The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various
ways. The point, however, is to change it."
Dialectical materialism is thus closely related
to Marx's and Engels's historical materialism
(and has sometimes been viewed as synonymous
with it). Marx rejected the language of "thesis,
antithesis, synthesis".Dialectical materialism
is an aspect of the broader subject of materialism,
which asserts the primacy of the material
world: in short, matter precedes thought.
Materialism is a realist philosophy of science,
which holds that the world is material; that
all phenomena in the universe consist of "matter
in motion," wherein all things are interdependent
and interconnected and develop according to
natural law; that the world exists outside
us and independently of our perception of
it; that thought is a reflection of the material
world in the brain, and that the world is
in principle knowable. Marx criticized classical
materialism as another idealist philosophy—idealist
because of its transhistorical understanding
of material contexts. The Young Hegelian Ludwig
Feuerbach had rejected Hegel's idealistic
philosophy and advocated materialism. Despite
being strongly influenced by Feuerbach, Marx
rejected Feuerbach's version of materialism
as inconsistent. The writings of Engels, especially
Anti-Dühring (1878) and Dialectics of Nature
(1875–82), were the source of the main doctrines
of dialectical materialism.
== Marx's dialectics ==
The concept of dialectical materialism emerges
from statements by Marx in the second edition
postface to his magnum opus, Capital. There
Marx says he intends to use Hegelian dialectics
but in revised form. He defends Hegel against
those who view him as a "dead dog" and then
says, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil
of that mighty thinker Hegel." Marx credits
Hegel with "being the first to present [dialectic's]
form of working in a comprehensive and conscious
manner". But he then criticizes Hegel for
turning dialectics upside down: "With him
it is standing on its head. It must be turned
right side up again, if you would discover
the rational kernel within the mystical shell."Marx's
criticism of Hegel asserts that Hegel's dialectics
go astray by dealing with ideas, with the
human mind. Hegel's dialectic, Marx says,
inappropriately concerns "the process of the
human brain"; it focuses on ideas. Hegel's
thought is in fact sometimes called dialectical
idealism, and Hegel himself is counted among
a number of other philosophers known as the
German idealists. Marx, on the contrary, believed
that dialectics should deal not with the mental
world of ideas but with "the material world",
the world of production and other economic
activity.For Marx, human history cannot be
fitted into any neat a priori schema. He explicitly
rejects the idea of Hegel's followers that
history can be understood as "a person apart,
a metaphysical subject of which real human
individuals are but the bearers". To interpret
history as though previous social formations
have somehow been aiming themselves toward
the present state of affairs is "to misunderstand
the historical movement by which the successive
generations transformed the results acquired
by the generations that preceded them". Marx's
rejection of this sort of teleology was one
reason for his enthusiastic (though not entirely
uncritical) reception of Darwin's theory of
natural selection.For Marx, dialectics is
not a formula for generating predetermined
outcomes but is a method for the empirical
study of social processes in terms of interrelations,
development, and transformation. In his introduction
to the Penguin edition of Marx's Capital,
Ernest Mandel writes, "When the dialectical
method is applied to the study of economic
problems, economic phenomena are not viewed
separately from each other, by bits and pieces,
but in their inner connection as an integrated
totality, structured around, and by, a basic
predominant mode of production."Marx's own
writings are almost exclusively concerned
with understanding human history in terms
of systemic processes, based on modes of production
(broadly speaking, the ways in which societies
are organized to employ their technological
powers to interact with their material surroundings).
This is called historical materialism. More
narrowly, within the framework of this general
theory of history, most of Marx's writing
is devoted to an analysis of the specific
structure and development of the capitalist
economy.
For his part, Engels applies a "dialectical"
approach to the natural world in general,
arguing that contemporary science is increasingly
recognizing the necessity of viewing natural
processes in terms of interconnectedness,
development, and transformation. Some scholars
have doubted that Engels's "dialectics of
nature" is a legitimate extension of Marx's
approach to social processes. Other scholars
have argued that despite Marx's insistence
that humans are natural beings in an evolving,
mutual relationship with the rest of nature,
Marx's own writings pay inadequate attention
to the ways in which human agency is constrained
by such factors as biology, geography, and
ecology.
== Engels's dialectics ==
Engels postulated three laws of dialectics
from his reading of Hegel's Science of Logic.
Engels elucidated these laws as the materialist
dialectic in his work Dialectics of Nature:
The law of the unity and conflict of opposites
The law of the passage of quantitative changes
into qualitative changes
The law of the negation of the negationThe
first law, which originates with the ancient
Ionian philosopher Heraclitus, was seen by
both Hegel and Vladimir Lenin as the central
feature of a dialectical understanding of
things:
It is in this dialectic as it is here understood,
that is, in the grasping of oppositions in
their unity, or of the positive in the negative,
that speculative thought consists. It is the
most important aspect of dialectic.
The splitting of a single whole and the cognition
of its contradictory parts is the essence
(one of the "essentials", one of the principal,
if not the principal, characteristics or features)
of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel,
too, puts the matter.
The second law Hegel took from Ancient Greek
philosophers, notably the paradox of the heap,
and explanation by Aristotle, and it is equated
with what scientists call phase transitions.
It may be traced to the ancient Ionian philosophers,
particularly Anaximenes from whom Aristotle,
Hegel, and Engels inherited the concept. For
all these authors, one of the main illustrations
is the phase transitions of water. There has
also been an effort to apply this mechanism
to social phenomena, whereby population increases
result in changes in social structure. The
law of the passage of quantitative changes
into qualitative changes can also be applied
to the process of social change and class
conflict.The third law, "negation of the negation",
originated with Hegel. Although Hegel coined
the term "negation of the negation", it gained
its fame from Marx's using it in Capital.
There Marx wrote this: "The [death] knell
of capitalist private property sounds. The
expropriators [capitalists] are expropriated.
The capitalist mode of appropriation, the
result of the capitalist mode of production,
produces capitalist private property. This
is the first negation [antithesis] of individual
private property. [The "first negation", or
antithesis, negates the thesis, which in this
instance is feudalism, the economic system
that preceded capitalism.] ... But capitalist
production begets, with the inexorability
of a law of Nature, its own negation. It [final
communism, the synthesis] is the negation
of [the] negation."Z. A. Jordan notes, "Engels
made constant use of the metaphysical insight
that the higher level of existence emerges
from and has its roots in the lower; that
the higher level constitutes a new order of
being with its irreducible laws; and that
this process of evolutionary advance is governed
by laws of development which reflect basic
properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'."
== Lenin's contributions ==
After reading Hegel's Science of Logic in
1914, Lenin made some brief notes outlining
three "elements" of logic. They are:
The determination of the concept out of itself
[the thing itself must be considered in its
relations and in its development];
The contradictory nature of the thing itself
(the other of itself), the contradictory forces
and tendencies in each phenomenon;
The union of analysis and synthesis.Lenin
develops these in a further series of notes,
and appears to argue that "the transition
of quantity into quality and vice versa" is
an example of the unity and opposition of
opposites expressed tentatively as "not only
the unity of opposites but the transitions
of every determination, quality, feature,
side, property into every other [into its
opposite?]."
Also, in his essay "On the Question of Dialectics",
Lenin stated that "Development is the 'struggle'
of opposites."
He stated that "The unity (coincidence, identity,
equal action) of opposites is conditional,
temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle
of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute,
just as development and motion are absolute."In
Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908), Lenin
explained dialectical materialism as three
axes: (i) the materialist inversion of Hegelian
dialectics, (ii) the historicity of ethical
principles ordered to class struggle, and
(iii) the convergence of "laws of evolution"
in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin),
and in political economy (Marx). Hence, Lenin
was philosophically positioned between historicist
Marxism (Labriola) and determinist Marxism—a
political position close to "social Darwinism"
(Kautsky). Moreover, late-century discoveries
in physics (x-rays, electrons), and the beginning
of quantum mechanics, philosophically challenged
previous conceptions of matter and materialism,
thus matter seemed to be disappearing. Lenin
disagreed:
'Matter disappears' means that the limit within
which we have hitherto known matter disappears,
and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper;
properties of matter are disappearing that
formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary,
and which are now revealed to be relative
and characteristic only of certain states
of matter. For the sole 'property' of matter,
with whose recognition philosophical materialism
is bound up, is the property of being an objective
reality, of existing outside of the mind.
Lenin was developing the work of Engels, who
said that "with each epoch-making discovery,
even in the sphere of natural science, materialism
has to change its form." One of Lenin's challenges
was distancing materialism, as a viable philosophical
outlook, from the "vulgar materialism" expressed
in the statement "the brain secretes thought
in the same way as the liver secretes bile"
(attributed to 18th-century physician Pierre
Jean Georges Cabanis); "metaphysical materialism"
(matter composed of immutable particles);
and 19th-century "mechanical materialism"
(matter as random molecules interacting per
the laws of mechanics). The philosophic solution
that Lenin (and Engels) proposed was "dialectical
materialism", wherein matter is defined as
objective reality, theoretically consistent
with (new) developments occurring in the sciences.
Lenin reassessed Feuerbach's philosophy and
concluded that it was in line with dialectical
materialism.
== Lukács's contributions ==
György Lukács, Minister of Culture in the
brief Béla Kun government of the Hungarian
Soviet Republic (1919), published History
and Class Consciousness (1923), in which he
defined dialectical materialism as the knowledge
of society as a whole, knowledge which, in
itself, was the class consciousness of the
proletariat. In the first chapter "What is
Orthodox Marxism?", Lukács defined orthodoxy
as fidelity to the "Marxist method", not fidelity
to "dogmas":
Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply
the uncritical acceptance of the results of
Marx's investigations. It is not the "belief"
in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of
a "sacred" book. On the contrary, orthodoxy
refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific
conviction that dialectical materialism is
the road to truth and that its methods can
be developed, expanded, and deepened, only
along the lines laid down by its founders.
(§1)
In his later works and actions, Lukács became
a leader of Democratic Marxism. He modified
many of his formulations of his 1923 works
and went on to develop a Marxist ontology
and played an active role in democratic movements
in Hungary in 1956 and the 1960s. He and his
associates became sharply critical of the
formulation of dialectical materialism in
the Soviet Union that was exported to those
countries under its control. In the 1960s,
his associates became known as the Budapest
School.
Lukács philosophical criticism of Marxist
revisionism proposed an intellectual return
to the Marxist method. As did Louis Althusser,
who later defined Marxism and psychoanalysis
as "conflictual sciences"; that political
factions and revisionism are inherent to Marxist
theory and political praxis, because dialectical
materialism is the philosophic product of
class struggle:
For this reason, the task of orthodox Marxism,
its victory over Revisionism and utopianism
can never mean the defeat, once and for all,
of false tendencies. It is an ever-renewed
struggle against the insidious effects of
bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat.
Marxist orthodoxy is no guardian of traditions,
it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming
the relation between the tasks of the immediate
present and the totality of the historical
process. (§5)
...the premise of dialectical materialism
is, we recall: 'It is not men's consciousness
that determines their existence, but, on the
contrary, their social existence that determines
their consciousness'.... Only when the core
of existence stands revealed as a social process
can existence be seen as the product, albeit
the hitherto unconscious product, of human
activity. (§5)
Philosophically aligned with Marx is the criticism
of the individualist, bourgeois philosophy
of the subject, which is founded upon the
voluntary and conscious subject. Against said
ideology is the primacy of social relations.
Existence—and thus the world—is the product
of human activity, but this can be seen only
by accepting the primacy of social process
on individual consciousness. This type of
consciousness is an effect of ideological
mystification.
At the 5th Congress of the Communist International
(July 1924), Grigory Zinoviev formally denounced
Lukács's heterodox definition of orthodox
Marxism as exclusively derived from fidelity
to the "Marxist method", and not to Communist
party dogmas; and denounced the Marxism developments
of the German theorist Karl Korsch.
== Stalin's contributions ==
In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin and his associates
formulated a version of dialectical and historical
materialism that became the "official" Soviet
interpretation of Marxism. It was codified
in Stalin's work, Dialectical and Historical
Materialism (1938), and popularized in textbooks
used for compulsory education within the Soviet
Union and throughout the Eastern Bloc. It
was exported to China as the "official" interpretation
of Marxism but, in its Soviet formulation,
has since then been widely rejected there.
== Mao's contributions ==
In On Contradiction (1937), Mao outlined a
version of dialectical materialism that subsumed
two of Engels's three principal laws of dialectics,
"the transformation of quantity into quality"
and "the negation of the negation" as sub-laws
(and not principal laws of their own) of the
first law, "the unity and interpenetration
of opposites".
== As a heuristic in biology and elsewhere
==
Historian of science Loren Graham has detailed
at length the role played by dialectical materialism
in the Soviet Union in disciplines as diverse
as biology, psychology, chemistry, cybernetics,
quantum mechanics, and cosmology. He has concluded
that, despite the Lysenko period in genetics
and constraints on free inquiry imposed by
political authorities, dialectical materialism
had a positive influence on the work of many
Soviet scientists.Some evolutionary biologists,
such as Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen
Jay Gould, have tried to employ dialectical
materialism in their approach. They view dialectics
as playing a precautionary heuristic role
in their work. From Lewontin's perspective,
we get this idea:
Dialectical materialism is not, and never
has been, a programmatic method for solving
particular physical problems. Rather, a dialectical
analysis provides an overview and a set of
warning signs against particular forms of
dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells
us, "Remember that history may leave an important
trace. Remember that being and becoming are
dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions
change and that the conditions necessary to
the initiation of some process may be destroyed
by the process itself. Remember to pay attention
to real objects in time and space and not
lose them in utterly idealized abstractions.
Remember that the qualitative effects of context
and interaction may be lost when phenomena
are isolated". And above all else, "Remember
that all the other caveats are only reminders
and warning signs whose application to different
circumstances of the real world is contingent."
Gould shared similar views regarding a heuristic
role for dialectical materialism. He wrote
that:
...dialectical thinking should be taken more
seriously by Western scholars, not discarded
because some nations of the second world have
constructed a cardboard version as an official
political doctrine....when 
presented as guidelines for a philosophy of
change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat,
the three classical laws of dialectics embody
a holistic vision that views change as interaction
among components of complete systems and sees
the components themselves not as a priori
entities, but as both products and inputs
to the system. Thus, the law of "interpenetrating
opposites" records the inextricable interdependence
of components: the "transformation of quantity
to quality" defends a systems-based view of
change that translates incremental inputs
into alterations of state, and the "negation
of negation" describes the direction given
to history because complex systems cannot
revert exactly to previous states.
This heuristic was also applied to the theory
of punctuated equilibrium proposed by Gould
and Niles Eldredge. They wrote that "history,
as Hegel said, moves upward in a spiral of
negations", and that "punctuated equilibria
is a model for discontinuous tempos of change
(in) the process of speciation and the deployment
of species in geological time." They noted
that "the law of transformation of quantity
into quality", "holds that a new quality emerges
in a leap as the slow accumulation of quantitative
changes, long resisted by a stable system,
finally forces it rapidly from one state into
another", a phenomenon described in some disciplines
as a paradigm shift. Apart from the commonly
cited example of water turning to steam with
increased temperature, Gould and Eldredge
noted another analogy in information theory,
"with its jargon of equilibrium, steady state,
and homeostasis maintained by negative feedback",
and "extremely rapid transitions that occur
with positive feedback".Lewontin, Gould, and
Eldredge were thus more interested in dialectical
materialism as a heuristic than a dogmatic
form of 'truth' or a statement of their politics.
Nevertheless, they found a readiness for critics
to "seize upon" key statements and portray
punctuated equilibrium, and exercises associated
with it, such as public exhibitions, as a
"Marxist plot".
== Philosophical evaluations ==
Some critics argue against dialectical materialism
on account of its adherence to a purely materialist
worldview, while others have objections to
the dialectic method it employs. There are
critics, such as the Marxist Alain Badiou,
who dispute the way the concept is interpreted.
Joseph Needham, an influential historian of
science and a Christian who nonetheless was
an adherent of dialectical materialism, suggested
that a more appropriate term might be "dialectical
organicism". Leszek Kołakowski, writing in
Main Currents of Marxism (1976), argued that
dialectical materialism consists partly of
"truisms with no specific Marxist content",
partly of "philosophical dogmas", partly of
nonsense, and partly of statements that—depending
on how they are interpreted—could be any
of these things. Max Eastman argued that dialectical
materialism lacks a psychological basis.Philosopher
Allen Wood argued that, in its form as an
official Soviet philosophy, dialectical materialism
was doomed to be superficial because "creativity
or critical thinking" was impossible in an
authoritarian environment. Nevertheless, he
considered the basic aims and principles of
dialectical materialism to be in harmony with
rational scientific thought.
== See also ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Materialism and the Dialectical Method, Maurice
Cornforth
Dialectical Materialism, Alexander Spirkin
Spirkin, Alexander (1990). Fundamentals of
Philosophy. Sergei Syrovatkin (trans.). Moscow:
Progress Publishers. ISBN 978-5-01-002582-3.
Archived from the original (DjVu, PDF, etc.)
on 6 November 2011. Retrieved 22 January 2011
This systematic exposition of dialectical
and historical materialism was awarded a prize
at a competition of textbooks for students
of higher educational establishments; first
published in Russian as "Основы философии".
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical
German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels
Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, V. I. Lenin
On the Question of Dialectics, V. I. Lenin
Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph
Stalin
On the Materialist Dialectic, Louis Althusser
Dialectical Materialism, V. G. Afanasyev
Oizerman T. I.; H. Campbell Creighton, M.
A. (translator, Oxon) (1988), The main Trends
in Philosophy. A Theoretical Analysis of the
History of Philosophy., Moscow: Progress Publishers,
ISBN 978-5-01-000506-1, retrieved 30 October
2010 First published in 1971, as "Главные
философские направления"
– The author traces the struggle between
materialism and idealism on the basis of the
dialectical-materialist conception of the
history of philosophy. The book was in 1979
awarded the Plekhanov prize under the decision
of the USSR Academy of Sciences.CS1 maint:
Multiple names: authors list (link)
Materialism And Historical Materialism, Anton
Pannekoek
Grant, Ted; Woods, Alan (1995), Reason in
Revolt, Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science,
London: Wellred, ISBN 978-1-900007-00-9 text
replication at Marxist.com
Grant, Ted; Woods, Alan (2003), Dialectical
Philosophy and Modern Science, Reason in Revolt,
Vol.2 (American ed.), Algora Publishing, ISBN
978-0-87586-158-6, retrieved 26 September
2010
Hollitscher, Walter (March 1953), "Dialectical
Materialism and the Physicist", Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, 9 (2): 54–57, retrieved
26 September 2010
Lefebvre, Henri; John Sturrock (translator)
(2009), Dialectical Materialism, Minneapolis,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN 978-0-8166-5618-9, retrieved 26 September
2010 First published 1940 by Presses Universitaires
de France, as Le Matérialisme Dialectique.
First English translation published 1968 by
Jonathan Cape Ltd.
History and Class Consciousness, György Lukács
Ioan, Petru "Logic and Dialectics" A. I. Cuza
University Press, Iaşi 1998.
Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic.
London and New York: Verso, 2009.
The Origins of Dialectical Materialism, Z.
A. Jordan
Dialectics For Kids
Dialectical Materialism: Its Laws, Categories,
and Practice, Ira Gollobin, Petras Press,
NY, 1986.
Dialectics for the New Century, ed. Bertell
Ollman and Tony Smith, Palgrave Macmillan,
England, 2008.
(in French) Eftichios Bitsakis, Physique contemporaine
et matérialisme dialectique, Éditions Sociales,
1973.
Oizerman : Dialectical Materialism and the
History of Philosophy
Afanasyev : Marxist Philosophy (Chapter 4
to Chapter 9)
Philosophy in the USSR: Problems of Dialectical
Materialism
(in French) Pascal Charbonnat, Histoire des
philosophies matérialistes, Syllepse, 2007
(ISBN 978-2849501245) (second edition, Kimé,
2013)
Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps
in Marx's Method
(in French) Évariste Sanchez-Palencia, Promenade
dialectique dans les sciences, Hermann, 476p.,
2012 (ISBN 978-2705682729)
Tucker, Robert, Philosophy and Myth in Karl
Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1961).
Ghosh, Shibdas, "Some Aspects of Marxism and
Dialectical Materialism" []
Ghosh, Shibdas, On Theory of Knowledge, Dialectical
Materialism, and the Revolutionary Life
Ghosh, Shibdas Science of Marxism is the Scientific
dialectical methodology
