Dialectics does not pretend to teach people to think. That is the pretentious claim of formal logic, to which Hegel ironically replied that logic no more teaches you to think than physiology teaches you to digest! Men and women thought, and even thought logically, long before they ever heard of logic. The categories of logic, and also dialectics, are derived from actual experience. For all their pretensions, the categories of formal logic do not stand above the crude world of material reality, but are only empty abstractions taken from reality comprehended in a one-sided and static manner, and then arbitrarily applied back to it.

By contrast, the first law of the dialectical method is absolute objectivity. In every case, it is necessary to discover the laws of motion of a given phenomenon by studying it from every point of view. The dialectical method is of great value in approaching things correctly, avoiding elementary philosophical blunders, and making sound scientific hypotheses. In view of the astonishing amount of mysticism that has emerged from arbitrary hypotheses, above all in theoretical physics, this is no mean advantage! But the dialectical method, said Engels, always seeks to derive its categories from a careful study of the facts and processes, not to force the facts into a rigid preconceived straitjacket:

We all agree, that in every field of science, in natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms and the various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science too the inter-connections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment.[51]

Science is founded on the search for general laws which can explain the workings of nature. Taking its starting point as experience, it does not confine itself to the mere collection of facts, but seeks to generalise on the basis of experience, going from the particular to the universal. The history of science is characterised by an ever-deepening process of approximation. We get closer and closer to the truth, without ever knowing the ” whole truth“. Ultimately, the test of scientific truth is experiment. “Experiment,” says Feynman, “is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth’.”[52]

The validity of forms of thought must, in the last analysis, depend on whether they correspond to the reality of the physical world. This cannot be established a priori, but must be demonstrated through observation and experiment. Formal logic, in contrast to all the natural sciences, is not empirical. Science derives its data from observation of the real world. Logic is supposed to be a priori, unlike all the subject matter with which it deals. There is a glaring contradiction here between form and content. Logic is not supposed to be derived from the real world, yet it is constantly applied to the facts of the real world. What is the relationship between the two sides?

Kant long ago explained that the forms of logic must reflect objective reality, or they would be entirely meaningless:

When we have reason to consider a judgment necessarily universal…we must consider it objective also, that is, that it expresses not merely a reference of our perception to a subject, but a quality of the object. For there would be no reason for the judgments of other men necessarily agreeing with mine, if it were not the unity of the object to which they all refer, and with which they accord; hence they must all agree with one another.[53]

This idea was developed further by Hegel, who removed the ambiguities present in Kant’s theory of knowledge and logic, and finally put on a sound basis by Marx and Engels, as explained by Engels:

Logical schemata, can only relate to forms of thought; but what we are dealing with here are only forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them; it is not nature and the realm of humanity which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history.[54]

  1. Engels, F. The Dialectics of Nature, pp. 64-5.

  2. Feynman, R. op. cit., chapter 1, p. 2.

  3. Kant, I. Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, quoted in E.V. Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, p. 90.

  4. Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, p. 43.