Dialectical Materialism and Developments in Contemporary ...

1 Dialectical Materialism andDevelopments in Contemporary ScienceThe Marxist, XXVI 4, October December 2010T. JAYARAMANINTRODUCTIONT oday we are more than a century and a half away from the origins ofwhat we would recognize as Dialectical Materialism . In the era whenthis philosophy was being formulated, science, in many disciplineswas passing through a phase of incremental progress. Biology wasdifferent, as Darwin s work created something of an upheaval, but inother disciplines it seemed to be an era of evolutionary progress ratherthan radical transformation. All of this changed in the first half of thetwentieth century, a period marked by the tumult of both the socialistrevolution and the radical advance of the sciences. After the manytransformations that have taken place since, in both the social-politicalworld and the human knowledge of the natural world, it is clearly ofvalue to Dialectical materialists to renew their understanding of adialectics of nature.

2 This is a demanding undertaking and it wouldneed the collective effort of many to fulfill such a mandate even note will attempt only a modest survey of some aspects ofdialectical Materialism in relation to Contemporary science. This notehas four sections that deal with the following MARXIST62a) A survey of some highlights of Contemporary science in relationto some key concerns of Dialectical ) A brief survey of the response of bourgeois philosophy of scienceto the advance of 20th century ) Some brief notes with regard to Dialectical Materialism andscience in the Soviet Uniond) Some observations on the current challenges to the dialecticalmaterialist viewpoint in relation to science, particularly with regardto . SOME HIGHLIGHTS OF 20TH CENTURY SCIENCEWe will begin by recalling some of the most significant advances ofthe science of the 20th century. We will do so in a manner thatspecifically highlights some of the traditional concerns of thedialectical materialist viewpoint.

3 There are undoubtedly subtle aspectsof these advances that need to be discussed, but we will return to someillustrative examples of these later in the remind the reader that by the term traditional concerns wemean the following:The primacy of mind over view that matter is essentially objective reality, that has anexistence independent of human perception or human and energy are human brain is the most organised and the highest form is always in motion. There is no motion without objects and processes are interconnected and world must be understood not as a complex of ready-madeobjects and things but as a complex of processes, in which all objectsand things are continuously undergoing changes and term development encompasses both motion and basic laws of the development of matter are:a) the unity and struggle of opposites leading to developmentb) quantitative changes lead to qualitative changesc) the law of the negation of the also recall that the stand and viewpoint of Marxists in relationto the overall advance of science is perhaps best captured in Engels Dialectical Materialism and Contemporary Science63speech at the graveside of Marx.

4 But this was not even half the was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery insome theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it wasas yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kindof joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changesin industry, and in historical development in general. We emphasize once again that the rest of this section is notintended to mean that the advance of science has been one ofunqualified success and not without false starts, wrong perceptionsand the pursuit of incorrect lines of research, resulting in the continualappearance of numerous contradictions in the scientific view of thenatural world. But in viewing the advance of the scientific knowledgeover the last century, we must emphasize the continued assertion ofthe instinctively Dialectical materialist character of science asrevealed in its ignore this aspect of science in favour of an outright skepticismwith regard to the Developments of Contemporary science would be anon- Dialectical viewpoint.

5 On the one hand, such skepticismpresupposes that when bourgeois society is transcended, scienceunder socialism will constitute an outright rejection of much ofcontemporary science and not a Dialectical negation. It also deniesthe reality that science is in essence not merely a contemplative activity,a view that bourgeois philosophies constantly revert to, but thatscientific knowledge is acquired through both theoretical reflectionas well as the conscious intervention of human beings in SUMMARY OBSERVATIONS In summary we may begin by noting the following in relation todialectical Materialism and the Developments of 20th century science: The materialist view of a mind-independent objective realitythat the activity of science seeks to explore and understand hasincreasingly become part of the overt and explicit view of science,strikingly exemplified in the physicists view of the structure of theatom and its substructures.

6 The view of space and time as attributes of matter in motion hasbeen remarkably deepened by the theories of MARXIST64 Objective reality is both structured and differentiated, withnew levels of the organization of matter requiring new laws and isrecognized as such by Contemporary science in an explicit manner. In the case of physical matter, qualitative transitions arisingfrom quantitative changes has become part of the standardunderstanding of science. Science has discovered the interconnected nature of objectivereality in ever newer forms. The universal nature of the laws of sciencediscovered on Earth has been established in practice in their ability toexplain and occasionally predict phenomena in other regions of theuniverse. The development of quantum mechanics brought to the forean objective contradiction in physical matter in the form of wave-particle duality. This is in contrast to the nature of contradictions inphysical matter that had been studied before where the appearance ofcontradictions and their resolution were simultaneous (For instancein the case of planetary motion, where the attractive gravitational forceof the Sun is balanced by the outward force due to the circular motionof the planet).

7 The varied advances in biology irrevocably indicate the unity ofall forms of living matter. The discovery of the elementary constituents of living matterand the discovery of the common set of processes at the molecularlevel that these constituents obey, provides the foundation for thisunified view of living matter. Alongside these discoveries, one of the great achievements of20th century biology in particular has been the integration ofevolutionary biology with genetics. Subsequently these discoverieshave also set the stage for a surge of advance in the study of thedevelopment of living matter, all the way from the its origins in physicaland chemical processes in non-living matter to the evolution of thehuman species. Development here, it must be emphasized, isunderstood in the sense of both growth and motion. Modern evolutionary biology acknowledges the need forqualitative different explanations at the level of macroevolution,including speciation, that however do not contradict the fundamentalview of adaptation and natural selection.

8 The notion that all matter is in a constant state of evolution isDialectical Materialism and Contemporary Science65now considered applicable to non-living and living matter in all itsforms and at all levels. Implicitly, even in the case of physical matterthe laws of motion governing motion due to various fundamentalforces are themselves recognized to be capable of quantitative changeand more generally, possibly, qualitative change. That the specific capabilities of the brain and the nervous system,ranging over a wide variety of functions, have a material basis inphysical, chemical and biological structures is now well-established,by a variety of now turn to a more detailed account of the basis for theseobservations in the development of 20th century science.(a) Space and time as attributes of matter in motionThe science of mechanics underwent a radical transformation in twodistinct ways in the twentieth century.

9 The first transformation beganwith the theories of relativity, first the special theory of relativity andsubsequently the general theory of relativity. Both these radicallydeepened the understanding that space and time are the attributes ofmatter in motion. In the special theory of relativity matter and energywere shown to be convertible, breaking down the traditional divisionbetween the two that had dominated science so far. Time was shownto be an intrinsic aspect of the motion of matter and not a (eternal)background in which matter was embedded (and certainly not an apriori conception, independent of matter or indeed objective reality).Space and time were shown to be on the same footing; it was space-time that was the attribute of matter in motion and not two independentattributes known as space and general theory of relativity took matters even farther, showingthat not only uniform motion, but even accelerated motion was anintrinsic property of matter.

10 Accelerated motion was identified withgravitation. Of course since Newton, gravitation is known to be anattribute of physical matter that does not depend on the qualitativefeatures of its different forms. The general theory of relativity alsoinitiated the theory of the evolution of physical matter, in a certainsense almost as though by stealth. The general theory of relativitynaturally led to the description of the evolution of the entire universe,where the term universe refers to all of space and time and the matterTHE MARXIST66contained inside it. (NB It is worth emphasizing that Newtonianmechanics did not describe a purely static universe, but an universewith only uniform or periodic motion. The great merit of Newton slaws of motion, as Bernal has emphasized, is the break from theAristotelean view of motion as the overcoming of friction. Newton sfirst law of motion proclaims motion (even if only uniform motion)as a fundamental attribute of matter).