Real philosophy ended with Hegel. Since then, we have seen only a tendency to repeat old ideas, occasionally a filling out of this or that detail, but no real breakthrough, no great new idea. This is hardly surprising. The unprecedented advances of science over the past hundred years make philosophy in the old sense of the word redundant. There is very little point in speculating about the nature of the universe, when we are in a position to uncover its secrets with the aid of ever more powerful telescopes, space probes, computers and particle accelerators. Just as the debate about the nature of the solar system was decided by Galileo’s telescope, so the advances in technique will settle the question of the history of the universe, only to pose new questions for future generations to solve.

“As soon as each separate science is required to clarify its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. All that remains in an independent state from all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws – formal logic and dialectics. Everything else merges into the positive science of nature and history.” (Engels)[33]

Yet philosophy still has a role to play, in the only two areas left to it – formal logic and dialectics. Science, as we have seen, is not merely concerned with accumulating facts. It still requires the active intervention of thought, which alone can discover the inner meaning of the facts, their lawfulness. It is still necessary to make hypotheses, which can guide our investigations along the most fruitful channels, to grasp the real interrelations between apparently unrelated phenomena, to derive order from chaos. This requires training and a thorough knowledge of the history of both science and philosophy. As the American philosopher George Santayana put it, “He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.” One of the most pernicious consequences of the influence of logical positivism in 20th century science is that all the great schools of the past were treated like a dead dog. Now we see where this attitude leads us. Those who haughtily dismissed “metaphysics” have been punished for their pride. At no time in the history of science has mysticism been so rampant as now.

The purely empirical school of thought inevitably leads to this, as Engels pointed out long ago:

Exclusive empiricism, which at most allows itself thinking in the form of mathematical calculation, imagines that it operates only with undeniable facts. In reality, however, it operates predominantly with traditional notions, with the largely obsolete products of thought of its predecessors, and such are positive and negative electricity, the electric force of separation, the contact theory. These serve it as the foundation of endless mathematical calculations in which, owing to the strictness of the mathematical formulation, the hypothetical nature of the premises gets comfortably forgotten. This kind of empiricism is as credulous towards the results of the thought of its predecessors as it is sceptical in its attitude to the results of contemporary thought. For it even the experimentally established facts have gradually become inseparable from their traditional interpretations…They have to resort to all kinds of subterfuges and untenable expedients, to the glossing over of irreconcilable contradictions, and thus finally land themselves into a medley of contradictions from which they have no escape.[34]

It is impossible for scientists to remain aloof from society, on the grounds that they are purely impartial. None of us live in a vacuum. As the American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky says:

Scientists often have a naïve faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution. The relation between scientific discovery and popular belief is not, however, a one-way street. Marxists are more right than wrong when they argue that the problems scientists take up, the way they go about solving them, and even the solutions they are inclined to accept, are conditioned by the intellectual, social, and economic environments in which they live and work.[35]

It is sometimes asserted that Marx and Engels considered the dialectic to be some kind of Absolute – the last word in human knowledge. Such a notion is a self-evident contradiction. The Marxian dialectic differs from the Hegelian in two fundamental ways. Firstly, it is a materialist philosophy, and therefore derives its categories from the world of physical reality. Nature is infinite, not closed. Likewise, truth itself is endless and cannot be summed up in a single all-embracing system. The negation of the negation, as Engels explains, is a kind of spiral of development – an open-ended system, not a closed circle. That is the second fundamental difference with the Hegelian philosophy, which ultimately contradicted itself by attempting to express the dialectic as a closed and absolute System.

Marx and Engels worked out the outline of a new dialectical method, the usefulness of which was brilliantly shown in the three volumes of Capital. But the enormous advances of 20th century science provide ample material with which to fill out, develop and extend the content of dialectics. The further evolution of chaos and complexity theory can provide the basis for such a development, which would be of immense benefit to both the natural and social sciences. We cannot therefore say that dialectical materialism will not in the future be overtaken by some new and more satisfactory mode of thinking. But we can certainly say that up to the present time, it is the most advanced, comprehensive and flexible method of scientific analysis available. Let Engels speak for himself on this subject:

Further, if no philosophy as such is needed any longer, then no system, not even a natural system of philosophy, is needed any longer either. The recognition of the fact that all the processes of nature are systematically interconnected drives science on to prove this systematic interconnection throughout, both in general and in detail. But an adequate, exhaustive scientific exposition of this interconnection, the formation of an exact mental image of the world system in which we live, remains impossible for us, as it does for all times. If at any epoch in the development of mankind such a final, definitive system of the interconnections within the world – physical as well as mental and historical – were constructed, this would mean that the realm of human knowledge had reached its limit, and that further historical development would be cut short from the moment when society had been brought into accord with that system – which would be an absurdity, pure nonsense.

Mankind therefore finds itself faced with a contradiction: on the one hand, it has to gain an exhaustive knowledge of the world system in all its interconnections, and on the other hand, this task can never be completely fulfilled because of the nature both of men and of the world system. But this contradiction not only lies in the nature of the two factors – the world and man – it is also the main lever of all intellectual advance, and constantly finds its solution, day by day, in the endless progressive development of humanity, just as for example mathematical problems find their solution in an infinite series or continued fractions. Actually, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by its author’s physical and mental constitution.[36]

  1. Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, p. 31.

  2. Engels, F.The Dialectics of Nature, pp. 185-6.

  3. Dobzhansky, T. Mankind Evolving, p. 138.

  4. Engels, F.Anti-Dühring, pp. 45-6.