Prueba de Hipótesis General y Específicas .1 Hipótesis general

The word ‘dialectic’ has been applied in a wide variety of meanings and con- notations. Originally, its meaning was associated with the idea of ‘discussion’. The Greek ‘dialégomai’ means to converse, to argue, and it is also the origin of the common terms ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialect’. Dialectics, properly, is the art of argument, and this meaning, among others, remains today. How was the transi- tion made from this meaning to a philosophical idea? In order to explain this, it is necessary first of all to present the phenomenon of ‘argument’ in its living meaning in social practice.

Suppose that you and your co-worker must accomplish some common task, but because of a difference in your dispositions or experience, you have differ- ing opinions on the way to achieve your goal. If you would both set to work, each in your own way, your work would be disorganised and nothing would come of it. Instead, you should first of all enter into a dialogue and come to an agreement.

In the first act of your dialogue, each of you would give an account of your own opinion. The contradiction that, before that moment, remained hidden would now be revealed – one of you thinks this, the other thinks that. Then, in the second act, each of you begins to object to the other, standing up for your own idea and attempting to undermine and demolish the other one. To reinforce your idea, you draw on the material of experience on which your opinion is based and with which it is organically connected. The person with whom you are talking behaves the same way, and the contradiction between you unfolds and develops. If all your experience were completely incompat- ible, you would not be able to find any common ground, and the contradic- tion would result in a complete impasse. But this does not usually happen. You are both members of one system of social collaboration, and that also means one system of experience. You have a sufficient amount of material of life in common, and the evidence that is valid for one of you will make an impact on the other. Because of this, when a contradiction achieves the greatest fullness and clarity, a turnabout occurs in the course of the process, and the third act begins. Your efforts are directed more and more against the contradiction itself, and it is gradually overcome. Either one of the two parti- cipants in the dialogue gives up their opinion and accepts the opinion of the other, or both of you accept a new resolution of the question that emerged from the combination of the material that was brought into the argument. One

way or another, two co-workers have reached an agreement, and from that point they have a common plan for carrying out their work in an organised way.

We see here that the dialectic is nothing other than an organising process, proceeding by means of contradiction, or, what is the same thing, by means of a struggle between different tendencies.

A similar picture is presented by any cogitation, any deliberation that – in the words of Plato – is ‘a conversation of the soul with itself concerning any sub- ject whatever’. Here, within one psyche, all possible incompatible views on the matter come forward. Each view attracts to itself the whole sum of experience to which it corresponds and which consequently supports it. Subsequently, as in the previous case, there occurs a turnabout toward the overcoming – the reconciliation – of the contradiction that had developed. The ambiguity and indeterminacy that have introduced disorganisation into consciousness are removed, and consciousness achieves a higher state of organisation than before.

The dialectical process that is most usual and important in life in exchange society is what occurs between the seller and the buyer in the act of commodity exchange. It begins with the contraposition of two prices proposed by the two different sides, and it is concluded by an agreement on a price, whereupon the exchange is completed.

Thus, the idea of dialectics originally is related to specific social phenomena of an ideologically organised character. But, consistent with the law of ‘socio- morphism’, which we have come across so often, the model of the dialectic created in one realm of social phenomena can also be applied outside those boundaries to other realms of phenomena, both social and extra-social. In real- ity, it is extremely versatile and useful, and so it can be very widely applied.

Two tribes live isolated from one another; then historical conditions bring them into contact. Being alien to one another, the two organisations enter into hostile relations. A war begins, develops, and then ultimately concludes with peace. Either one side subordinates the other, or they both – having become better acquainted with each other and having mutually learned to value the powers of their opponent – switch to friendly economic relations and political alliance. In both cases, organised relations replace the previ- ous existential contradiction by means of the development of that contradic- tion.

A person’s organism is exposed to a harmful influence – the invasion of disease-producing microbes which rapidly multiply in it. The organism begins a struggle against them and the toxins they produce. This struggle proceeds in the form of ‘illness’ and is accompanied first by the growing destruction of vital

equilibrium and subsequently by the gradual restoration of that equilibrium. The microbes die or transform into a relatively harmless culture. The result is that the vital system turns out to be organised somewhat differently from before the illness, in that it displays, for example, the fact of ‘immunity’ – i.e. a heightened power of resistance to the sort of microbe which had caused the illness. In this case, it is also obviously easy to present the whole process according to the dialectical model.

Indeed, all the phenomena of life, in general, can easily fit into this model. The struggle for existence, for animals and plants alike, is accomplished by the expenditure and assimilation of energy – two opposite tendencies which take on various forms and by means of whose interrelationships the course of life is conditioned. This is sufficient to allow us to depict life in its most general form as a dialectical – i.e. organisational – process that operates on the basis of the struggle of opposites.

Further, it is possible to apply the same point of view to the rest of ‘dead’ nature. To do this, everything we find that is stable and more or less perma- nent – for example, all kinds of bodies with their observed forms – must be understood as the product of the equilibrium of oppositely directed tenden- cies. So, a waterfall retains the same structure, even though the water in it continuously flows from above to below. A crystal formed in a solution of salt continually loses particles which go off into the surrounding liquid and obtains new particles which precipitate out of that liquid. In every thing, in every phe- nomenon, one can find, or more accurately, one can substitute two such move- ments – two streams of change flowing in opposite directions.

Nevertheless, this still does not give us the dialectic in its full and exact meaning. According to its basic definition, obtained by analysing how it arose out of social being, it is an organising process. The idea of ‘organisation’ is usu- ally applied only to living nature and the rest of nature is called ‘un-organised’, ‘non-organic’. It is obvious that in order to apply the dialectical model in its true meaning, it is necessary to revise this distinction between organic and non-organic and remove the absolute character which it acquires in every- day thinking. We need to understand ‘dead’ nature as being merely organised more weakly and to a lower degree than the realm of life, but organised to some extent, all the same. We need to consider any stability – any definite equilib- rium in bodies that do not possess the characteristics of life – to be an expres- sion of a certain lower stage of organisation. Then it is possible to talk about dialectical processes also in relation to the non-organic sphere of our experi- ence.

Historically, the idea of the dialectic in philosophy was worked out very gradually and is almost as ancient as philosophy itself. Its origins are already

evident in the Milesian school, with the enigmatically profound thinker, Anax- imander. His ‘boundless-indeterminate’ contains a latent form of the dialectic in the contradiction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, which separated themselves out of the chaos of primordial matter and then united to form water, the basis of all other things. Water therefore appears as the dialectical product of two an- tagonistic forces. Through their struggle the unorganised basis of the universe, apeiron, is transformed into the organised foundation, water.

The creator of a real dialectical worldview was Heraclitus the Obscure, who lived approximately 540–470bce.1 Heraclitus was born in Ephesus, second only to Miletus as the most important trading colony of the Greeks in Asia Minor. Unfortunately, only insignificant fragments remain of the work of this brilliant philosopher. Furthermore, because of the still insufficiently developed philosophical terminology of his day, it was difficult for him to express his ideas. That terminology debased his ideas badly, and the explanation of those ideas by later writers is extremely unreliable. Therefore, one can talk about the views of Heraclitus in only the most general terms.

Heraclitus was, in the first place, a successor to the hylozoism of the Milesian school. Like Thales and Anaximander, he solved the mystery of being through the materialist substitution but in a radically transformed form. He took fire to be arche, the origin and essence of all things. In the naïve observations of naturalists of that time, fire was conceived as a sensuous thing, but one which was at the same time a living movement. Fire itself continually changes, and it changes everything on which it acts. For Thales and his successors, arche possessed an internal activeness but was not itself activeness, while for Heraclitus activeness is exactly what it was. He rejected any stasis, any stability, any unchanging basis of phenomena. ‘Everything flows’ is the universal formula of his philosophy.

However, do we not see various solid things around us? Herodotus would reply that this is an illusion, an error of sensory perception. In the universal flow – in the eternal fire – things only come into being and are destroyed. If something seems permanent to you, this is the result of the temporal equilib- rium of opposing movements.

Of all the processes of nature, the great power of fire summons up the idea of struggle, of the pitiless mutual destruction of hostile elements. Heraclitus conceived of all being – the entire development of the world – precisely in the form of struggle or enmity, polemos. ‘One must know that war is universal, that

1 The exact dates of Heraclitus’s birth and death are not known, and today they are generally given as c. 535–c. 475 bce.

justice is discord, and that everything arises through struggle and of necessity’. ‘War is the father of everything, the king of everything’.2 In the struggle of opposites, each thing necessarily transforms into its opposite.

The same applies to the universe as a whole. Following exactly the same path, it cycles through two movements, downward and upward. The first leads toward the transformation of the world fire into the seemingly solid elements of air, water, and earth; the second leads toward their opposite resolution into fire. So, the world springs up out of fire and disappears into fire in a strict, periodic pattern; it is resurrected again only to perish again.

What remains in this cosmic flow? Only one thing: the regularity of its changes, the consistency of its coming into being and its destruction. What remains – speaking the language of later philosophy – is only the dialectic itself. Fire, according to Heraclitus, is not only the fundamental principle of nature, it is also the essence of the soul – a particle of the primordial world fire contained in the human body that is a person’s logos, reason, organising force of life. And that is why the soul can apprehend the external world: because it is consubstantial with it.

Historians of philosophy suggest that Heraclitus’s doctrine regarding fire as the source of the life of the universe was formed under the influence of eastern- Aryan religion, with its cult of fire. This is very probable. About a hundred years before Heraclitus, the great religious reformer Zarathustra (Zoroaster) appeared in eastern Iran. Zarathustra gave an extremely refined form, of a deeply philosophical character, to the ancient popular faith of the aboriginal tribes of that region, who were fire-worshippers. His doctrines were at a level of abstraction that put them on the border between religion and philosophy, and, in their genius, they were capable of making a powerful effect on such a serious thinker as Heraclitus.

Moreover, certain elements of the dialectic are outlined in Zarathustra’s doctrine, although in a dualistic form, that Heraclitus – coming from a dif- ferent social formation – had to discard. To be precise, Zarathustra conceived of the life of the universe as the constant war of two principles, good and evil, Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman in the usual, corrupt- ed translation). The former is the incarnation of the organising, creative power of human labour; the latter is the incarnation of elemental nature which is labour’s enemy. In Zarathustra’s cosmogony, when the universe was created, these two world principles were still combined. It was only afterwards that they became separated and came into conflict, and that conflict will be resolved

when they are united again. The model is almost dialectical. The extent to which such a religion could have prepared the way for Heraclitus’s ideas is clear, and he surely was familiar with it, since in his time the Greek colonies of Asia Minor were actually politically subordinated to the Persians, who were follow- ers of Zarathustra.3

Heraclitus’s doctrine had a great influence on philosophers who followed, and elements of the dialectic can be found in all their doctrines, even in those that appear most hostile. But the dialectical worldview, as a system, did not spread in the ancient world, and did not even give rise to a philosophical school. Heraclitus was not understood, and no one popularised his ideas. Sub- sequently, with the passage of time, the development of ancient society – owing to its slaveholding organisation – slowed down, came to a stop, and then began to decay. The dialectic – the philosophical incarnation of real development through the process of contradiction – did not have a solid foothold in the real- ity of the day.4

In his historical context, Heraclitus himself was quite an enigmatic person. He was an aristocrat and a reactionary. He was an enemy of the ‘demos’ which was rising at that time in Ephesus as in other cities of Greece. A strange figure to be the bearer of such revolutionary philosophical ideas! This is all the more true, since in his times the Eleatic school – which articulated the conservative ideas of the aristocracy and a school that took a position diametrically opposed to him – already existed. Xenophanes and Parmenides taught that in reality movement was impossible, that unitary and universal being was static and unchanging, and that everything that humans perceive as change was only outward appearance, a deception of the senses. Such a point of view was much more understandable and natural for supporters of stasis in social life, no

3 Fire-worshipping religions were formed under the patriarchal-clan way of life before feu- dalism. They are dominated by the spirit of labour and not the spirit of exploitation, which permeates religions of the feudal type. Characteristics of the household economy are clearly revealed in ancient Iranian beliefs: respect for labour is the basis of their morality. The fire of the home hearth was the centre of the labour economy of the small kinship group and later of the family, especially in the harsh climate of the more northern lands from which the Aryan tribes came to Media and Persia, and it is also true of the eastern plateaus of Iran, where they first settled. This was how the cult of fire originated. Aryans of ancient India – close relatives of the Iranians – were apparently originally also fire-worshippers, and many scholars consider the ancient Indian gods as various ‘hypostases’ – that is, appearances in various personae – of the separate aspects and characteristics of the one god – Agna, Fire.

4 And the word ‘dialectic’ at that time had not attained its later meaning. It retained its literal meaning – that is, the art of argument and proof – as it was taught, for example, by the Sophists.

matter how difficult accepting it would be for people who were insufficiently imbued with an authoritarian, static mode of thought.

Heraclitus is portrayed as a pessimist. In his philosophy, the movement of the universe actually lacks any kind of progressiveness; it goes in an eternal circle. His dialectic was not a theory of development in the proper meaning of the word. It is very probable that Heraclitus, like the Eleatics, was spiritually drawn to the permanent and unchanging, but he happened to live in a trad- ing colony in an era when it was rapidly developing economically and politi- cally and when the natural economy and feudal forms of life dear to his heart were collapsing. Perhaps it was because he felt the changes that were going on around him so painfully that they struck his consciousness and decisively influenced his philosophical thought. But having arrived at the unhappy con- clusion that ‘everything flows’, everything changed for him. With great honesty and consistency of thought, Heraclitus did not seek false consolation in treating the flow of reality as an illusion, but rather made this conclusion the founda- tion of his worldview. But he must have remained all the more isolated a figure within his surroundings.

After Heraclitus, we encounter the dialectical model – with some variations and sometimes in a disguised form – among a majority of thinkers of ancient and modern times. But to find worldviews in which the dialectical model is all-encompassing, we need only look to the recent past – to the philosophy of the classical German idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and especially Hegel.

The doctrine of Johann Fichte is a metaphysics that is based on individual-