p Marxist materialist dialectics is the most profound, comprehensive and fruitful theory of motion and development. It is a summing up of the many centuries of our cognition of the world, a generalisation of the boundless data of social practice.

p Materialist dialectics and philosophical materialism are inseparably connected. They are interwoven, being two aspects of the single philosophical system of Marxism.

p By the "art of dialectics" the ancient Greek philosophers meant the ability to establish the truth by means of disputation or discussion that revealed the difference in the views of the disputants. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, German idealist philosophers, particularly Hegel, understood by dialectics the development of thought through the contradictions disclosed in thought itself. Hegel gave a careful description of the basic forms of dialectical thought. However, in developing his dialectics he proceeded from an erroneous, idealist point of view, according to which dialectical development was ascribed solely to thought, the spirit, the idea, but not to nature. As Marx said, Hegel’s dialectics was "standing on its head”. To be correctly conceived, dialectics had to be put on its feet. This Marx and Engels did, creating materialist dialectics and imparting a new content to the term “ dialectics”.

p The founders of Marxism, proceeding from the principle of the material unity of the world, began to denote by dialectics the theory of universal connections, of the most general laws of development of all reality. “Dialectics” was thus transformed from Hegel’s idealist doctrine of the motion of thought into a materialist theory of the general laws of the development of being. Thus, the dialectics of development of our notions (subjective dialectics) was found to be a reflection in scientific thought of the dialectics of development of being itself (objective dialectics).

p The various branches of science study the forms of motion and laws of different spheres of reality. Dialectics is a special science. 60 It devotes itself to the most general laws of all motion, change and development. The universality of its laws lies in the fact that they operate in nature and society, and that thought itself is governed by them.

p Marx and Engels saw in dialectics not only a scientific theory, but also a method of cognition and a guide to action. Knowledge of the general laws of development makes it possible to analyse the past, to understand correctly what is taking place at present and to foresee the future. For this reason it is a method of approach to research and to practical action based on its results.

p Throughout its history, dialectics has had to fight against metaphysics, a method of thinking and a world outlook that is hostile to it, and that fight continues today.

p In Marxist philosophical literature the word “metaphysics” is used in a different sense to that in pre-Marxian and modern bourgeois philosophical literature. In pre-Marxian literature this Greek word, or rather expression, denoted a special section of philosophy, in which philosophers tried, and still try, to apprehend by purely speculative thought the allegedly immutable eternal essence of things.

p In criticising the unscientific, artificial systems of metaphysics, Marx and Engels used the word “metaphysics” to denote the method of investigation and thought employed by the founders of these systems, which was contrary to the dialectical method, instead of using it to denote a section of philosophy or speculative cognition. At present the term is used in Marxist philosophy almost exclusively in the sense given it by Marx and Engels.

p The basic defect of metaphysics is its one-sided, limited, inflexible outlook upon the world—-its tendency to exaggerate and make absolute individual aspects of phenomena and to ignore other, no less important aspects. The metaphysician, for example, discerns the relative stability, the definiteness of a thing, but does not notice its change and development. He concentrates his attention on the features that distinguish a particular phenomenon from all others, but he is incapable of discerning its many-sided relations and profound connections with other things and phenomena. He recognises only final answers to all questions confronting science, and does not understand that reality itself is in a state of development and that a scientific proposition possesses meaning only within definite bounds.

p The metaphysical method is more or less adequate for day-to-day usage and the lower phases of scientific development, but inevitably breaks down when the attempt is made to use it for explaining complex processes of development. Natural science and socio-political affairs reveal at each step the inadequacy of metaphysics and the need to replace it by dialectics.

p In spite of this, metaphysics has not been discarded as obsolete even today, whether in philosophy or the special sciences.

p How to explain the survival of metaphysics? There was a time when scientific thought was in the main not dialectical, but metaphysical. The metaphysical mode of thought as a method of science took final shape and became widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the time of the emergence of modern science. At that time, natural science was engaged mostly in collecting information about nature, describing different things and phenomena and classifying nature and its phenomena into distinct classes. In order to describe any particular thing it had to be isolated from the totality of other things, and examined separately. This approach gave rise to the custom of studying things and phenomena in isolation, outside their universal connection. This prevented people from seeing the development of things, their origin from other, different things. It was thus that the metaphysical mode of thought came into being, viewing things in isolation from one another and ignoring their development. Metaphysics reigned supreme in man’s consciousness for a long time and became a tradition of scientific thought.

p Nothing can justify the application of the metaphysical method in our time. It is a backward method, a backward world outlook, and has a very adverse effect on scientific cognition and socio- political affairs, because it leads easily to gross errors and misconceptions.

p A second reason why metaphysics has survived is the hostile attitude which the ideologists of the bourgeoisie have long displayed towards materialist dialectics.

p “In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors,” wrote Marx, "because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”^^23^^

p It is not surprising that, under the political and ideological influence of reaction, many scientists and philosophers in the capitalist countries are to this day afraid of dialectics, do not know of it and do not study it, regard it with prejudice and take their cue from metaphysics.

Marxist materialist dialectics provides a reliable weapon against metaphysics, for a scientific examination of all the phenomena of developing reality.