Dialectics teaches us to study things in motion, not statically; in their life, not in their death. Every development is rooted in earlier stages, and in turn is the embryo and starting point of new developments – a never-ending web of relations that reinforce and perpetuate each other. Hegel already developed this idea in his Logic and other works. Dialectics teaches us to study things and processes in all their interconnections. This is important as a methodology in areas such as animal morphology. It is not possible to modify one part of the anatomy without producing changes in all the others. Here too there is a dialectical relationship.
General tendencies in society can find their reflection in ideology, including science, and reactionary ideas can be expressed in science: for example, certain theories in genetics that attempt to provide a scientific basis for racism. In recent years the crisis of bourgeois ideology has been expressed, among other things, by a general drift towards idealism, mysticism and superstition. One of the purposes of this book was to identify and combat these tendencies. This is also a philosophical question.
In our own period philosophy has gotten itself a very bad name. This is well merited. When reading the bourgeois philosophers of the last hundred years, it is hard to know what is worse: the barrenness of the content or the intolerable pretentiousness of the manner in which it is expressed. The content is trivial and banal, as superficial as a crossword puzzle, yet they make the most grandiose claims for it, strutting around and ridiculing the thoughts of the great philosophers of the past with the most astounding insolence.
Modern bourgeois philosophy has become arid and stultified. It is remote from reality and shows a complete disregard for the life of ordinary people. So it is no wonder that people in turn treat it with contempt. At no time in history has philosophy seemed as irrelevant as the present. The total bankruptcy of modern bourgeois philosophy can be explained in part from the fact that Hegel carried traditional philosophy to its limits, leaving very little room for the further development of philosophy as philosophy.
But the most important reason for the crisis of philosophy is the development of science itself, which has answered many of the questions that in the past were considered the field of philosophy. The field open to speculative thought has been reduced to insignificance. Nevertheless, incorrect philosophical ideas have had a damaging effect on science itself.
In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels we do not have a philosophical system, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which, if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the methodological armoury of science. Unfortunately, such a work has never been seriously undertaken. With all its colossal resources, the Soviet Union did not produce it. The marvellous insights of Marx and Engels on philosophy and science were left in an undeveloped state. Yet dialectics still managed to penetrate scientific thinking, especially through chaos theory and its derivatives.