One of the main characteristics of the great scientists of the Renaissance was that they were whole human beings. They had an all-rounded development, which enabled, for example, Leonardo da Vinci to be a great engineer, mathematician and mechanician, as well as an artist of genius. The same was true of Dürer, Machiavelli, Luther, and countless others, of whom Engels wrote:

“The heroes of that time were not yet in thrall to the division of labour, the restricting effects of which, with its production of one-sidedness, we so often notice in their successors.”[18] The division of labour, of course, plays a necessary role in the development of the productive forces. However, under capitalism, this has been carried to such an extreme that it begins to turn into its opposite.

The extreme division, on the one hand, between mental and manual labour means that millions of men and women are reduced to a life of unthinking drudgery on the production line, denied of any possibility to display the creativity and inventiveness which is latent in every human being. At the other extreme, we have the development of a kind of intellectual priestly caste that has arrogated to itself the sole right to the title of “guardians of science and culture”. To the degree that these people become remote from the real life of society, this has a negative effect on their consciousness. They develop in an entirely narrow, one-sided way. Not only is there an abyss separating “artists” from scientists, but the scientific community itself is riven with ever-increasing divisions between increasingly narrow specialisations. It is ironic that, precisely when the “lines of demarcation” between physics, chemistry and biology are breaking down, the gulf that divides even different branches of, say, physics has become virtually unbridgeable.

James Gleick describes the situation thus:

Few laymen realise how tightly compartmentalised the scientific community had become, a battleship with bulkheads sealed against leaks. Biologists had enough to read without keeping up with the mathematical literature – for that matter, molecular biologists had enough to read without keeping up with population biology, physicists had better ways to spend their time than sifting through the meteorology journals.

In recent years, the advent of chaos theory is one of the indications that something is beginning to change in the scientific community. Increasingly, scientists from different fields feel that they have somehow reached a dead end. It is necessary to break out in a new direction. The birth of chaos mathematics, therefore, is a proof as Engels would have said, of the dialectical character of nature, a reminder that reality consists of whole dynamic systems, or even one whole system, and not of models (however useful) abstracted from them. What are the main features of chaos theory? Gleick describes them in the following way:

“To some physicists, chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”

“They feel that they are turning back a trend in science towards reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts: quarks, chromosomes, or neutrons. They believe that they are looking for the whole.”

The method of dialectical materialism is precisely to look at “process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”

More and more over the past decade, he’d begun to sense that the old reductionist approaches were reaching a dead end, and that even some of the hard-core physical scientists were getting fed up with mathematical abstractions that ignored the real complexities of the world. They seemed to be half-consciously groping for a new approach – and in the process, he thought, they were cutting across the traditional boundaries in a way they hadn’t done in years. Maybe centuries.[19]

Because chaos is a science of whole dynamic systems, rather than separate parts, it represents, in effect, an unacknowledged vindication of the dialectical view. Up to now, scientific investigation has been too much isolated into its constituent parts. In pursuit of the “parts” the scientific specialist becomes too specialised not infrequently losing all sight of the “whole”. Experimentation and theoretical rationalisations thus became increasingly removed from reality. More than a century ago, Engels criticised the narrowness of what he called the metaphysical method, which consisted of looking at things in an isolated way, which lost sight of the whole. The starting point of the supporters of chaos theory was a reaction against precisely this method, which they call “reductionism”. Engels explained that the “reduction” of the study of nature to separate disciplines is to some extent necessary and inevitable.

When we reflect on nature or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless maze of connections in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away…

But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of phenomena as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we cannot do this, we are not clear about the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately according to its nature, special causes and effects, etc.

But as Engels warned, too great a retreat into “reductionism” can lead to an undialectical view, or a drift to metaphysical ideas.

The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the division of the different natural processes and objects into definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms – these were the fundamental conditions for the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this has bequeathed us the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, detached from the general context; of observing them not in their motion, but in their state of rest; not as essentially variable elements, but as constant ones; not in their life, but in their death.[20]

Now compare this with the following passage from Gleick’s book:

Scientists break things apart and look at them one at a time. If they want to examine the interaction of subatomic particles, they put two or three together. There is complication enough. The power of self-similarity, though, begins at much greater levels of complexity. It is a matter of looking at the whole.[21]

If we substitute the word “reductionism” for “the metaphysical mode of thought”, we see that the central idea is identical. Now see what conclusion Engels drew from his criticism of reductionism (“the metaphysical method”):

But for dialectics, which grasps things and their images, ideas, essentially in their interconnection, in their sequence, their movement, their birth and death, such processes as those mentioned above are so many corroborations of its own method of treatment. Nature is the test of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature’s process is dialectical and not metaphysical.

But the scientists who have learnt to think dialectically are still few and far between, and hence the conflict between the discoveries made and the old traditional mode of thought is the explanation of the boundless confusion which now reigns in theoretical natural science and reduces both teachers and students, writers and readers to despair.[22]

Over one hundred years ago, old Engels accurately describes the state of the physical sciences today. This is acknowledged by Ilya Prigogine (Nobel-prize winner for chemistry 1977) and Isabelle Stengers in their book Order Out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, where they write the following:

To a certain extent, there is an analogy between this conflict (between Newtonian physics and the new scientific ideas) and the one that gave rise to dialectical materialism…The idea of a history of nature as an integral part of materialism was asserted by Marx and, in greater detail, by Engels. Contemporary developments in physics, the discovery of the constructive role played by irreversibility, have thus raised within the natural sciences a question that has long been asked by materialists. For them, understanding nature meant understanding it as being capable of producing man and his societies.

Moreover, at the time Engels wrote his Dialectics of Nature, the physical sciences seemed to have rejected the mechanistic world view and drawn closer to the idea of an historical development of nature. Engels mentions three fundamental discoveries: energy and the laws governing its qualitative transformations, the cell as the basic constituent of life, and Darwin’s discovery of the evolution of species. In view of these great discoveries, Engels came to the conclusion that the mechanistic world view was dead.[23]

Despite all the wonderful advances of science and technology, there is a deep-seated feeling of malaise. An increasing number of scientists are beginning to rebel against the prevailing orthodoxies and seek new solutions to the problems facing them. Sooner or later, this is bound to result in a new revolution in science, similar to the one effected by Einstein and Planck at the beginning of the 20th century. Significantly, Einstein himself was far from being a member of the scientific establishment. Gleick remarked:

The mainstream for most of the twentieth century, has been particle physics, exploring the building blocks of matter at higher and higher energies, smaller and smaller scale, shorter and shorter times. Out of particle physics have come theories about the fundamental forces of nature and about the origin of the universe. Yet some young physicists have grown dissatisfied with the direction of the most prestigious of sciences. Progress has begun to seem slow, the naming of new particles futile, the body of theory cluttered. With the coming of chaos, younger scientists believed they were seeing the beginnings of a course change for all of physics. The field had been dominated long enough, they felt, by the glittering abstractions of high-energy particles and quantum mechanics.

  1. Engels, F. The Dialectics of Nature, p. 31.

  2. Gleick, J. op. cit., p. 31, 5, 11 and 61-2.

  3. Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, pp. 24-5.

  4. Gleick, J. op. cit., p. 115.

  5. Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, p. 29.

  6. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. op. cit., pp. 252-3.