3418. Poetry: There Is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods

By George Gordon Byron [1788-1824] 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

3417. Book Review: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution

By Anthony Chaney, Society for U.S. Intellectual History (USIH), March 27, 2016 

 

Earlier this year, the state of Texas passed a bill banning municipalities from limiting the practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) locally. In 2014, the city of Denton voted to prohibit fracking within its borders, and this new bill was the response of state legislators. One oil industry representative explained his support for the bill by saying that some people just wanted to stop drilling for oil and gas altogether. “To these folks I say, ‘Ride your horse to work every day’,” he added.

One might go on for a long time unpacking the remark. I heard it in connection to my re-reading of The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 classic of social-environmental-intellectual history.

Along with other early classics by David Worster and William Cronin, Merchant’s book represented a decade of historical scholarship following the widespread emergence of modern environmentalism during the last few years of the 1960s. The work done by these historians added complexity and sophistication to initial conversations on the topic, such as Lynn White, Jr.’s seminal essay, “The Historical Roots of our Environmental Crisis,” published in Science in 1967. To identify the root of the problem, White initially seized on the Scientific Revolution, the “marriage between science and technology” that marked the shift from the medieval to the modern. But he quickly leapt back another half a millennium, to Christianity’s snuffing out of the old pagan animism. By pinning the blame on the Judeo-Christian element in the Western mind, White could then identify a solution to present troubles in the equivalent of “a new religion.” Merchant, in contrast, burrowed into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and put hundreds of pages of scholarly flesh on the bones that White had skimmed over.

Her work culminates, just past the halfway point, in five industrial-strength paragraphs. To remedy the anxious breakdown of all the old hierarchical and geocentric orders, new forms of order and power were provided, she explains. The new order was based on a “determined system” of natural laws. Power was redefined as

active and immediate intervention in a secularized world. Order and power together constituted control. Rational control over nature, society, and the self was achieved by redefining reality itself through the new machine metaphor.

By depicting nature as “a system of dead, inert particles,” the machine metaphor permitted a new kind of leveraging of the natural world: large-scale, profit-driven, and based on values all “fully compatible with the directions taken by commercial capitalism” (193).

This is where I thought of the remarks of the Texas senator. It may be that the oil and gas industry and their representatives grasp the environmentalist critique more clearly than do many mainstream sympathizers.

Here and elsewhere, Merchant’s analysis lays the loss of the moral constraints that once protected nature at the doorstep of “the emerging market economy.” Capitalism and the “mechanistic utopia” underwrote new forms of hierarchy that “tended to widen the gap between upper and lower social classes” (80, 185). What was needed wasn’t necessarily a new religion, but a new economic system to combat the present crisis, or so implied The Death of Nature in the year Ronald Reagan was elected president.

The Death of Nature is also significant for the case it made for an environmental history. Too heavy a reliance on economic or political modes of historical explanation was “inadequate,” Merchant argued. She offered instead an “ecosystem model,” a history “from the ground up” (42). This explains the “ecology” in her subtitle, and it partially explains the “women” in the subtitle, too. Before the triumph of mechanism, an association between nature and women had included both positive and negative components. For the triumph to occur, the positives had to be eliminated. The negatives were then constituted as persons and targeted. Eliminating the perception of a living, nurturing earth meant eliminating those women who were perceived to have access to earth’s reproductive bounty. Midwives and other practitioners of folk medicine were identified as witches and burned.

Merchant’s inclusion of this rich, gender-related material was informed by a decade of identity politics, the rise of a bolder and more separatist feminism, and the disciplinary standing of social history after the crises of the Sixties and Seventies. When Merchant spoke of “history from the ground up,” she was of course alluding to the “bottom up” perspective of social history, which then held the moral high ground within the field.

What may not have been as clear at the time of publication was how The Death of Nature was one of several variations on a broader post-Sixties theme. It was a theme in which communal-Gaia-woman was set off against rational-Promethean-man, within a consciousness of environmental deterioration. Richard Tarnas’s survey, The Passion of the Western Mind (1991), ends on something of that note. Beginning in the late 1980s, SUNY Press devoted a whole series to Constructive Modern Thought, under the editorship of David Ray Griffin, and many of the writers in that series play a similar tune. Looking back, it appears that The Death of Nature was one of the works that initiated a period when eco-feminist theory offered the best hope for a humane and fruitful postmodernism.

That hope has not completely evaporated. Who can argue that the earth’s atmosphere would not now be so pumped full of carbon particles had the earth continued to be honored as a living Mother, rather than being penetrated and probed? The extractive industries and their financiers have been the big winners of modernization, the biggest shapers of the way we now live. To see the world as alive again would likely mean also to re-gender it, to restore its “female soul.” Calling for this sort of restoration, however, would be to traffic in a feminine essentialism which Merchant soundly rejects. “I am not asking about unchanging essences,” she assures in her 1990 preface. Her concern is with “social change” and “changing constructions of nature” (xvi). The point is under-argued, but her insistence remains with the premise that the human perception of reality is a construct, socio-economically situated. That stance must dismiss any creeping essentialism.

Now I come to matters in The Death of Nature that remain most live to me.  Reality is a human construct, and as such, it can be re-constructed. That’s the basic premise, is it not? If accepted, it can undermine prevailing constructions, ones that make the natural world, women, people of color, and the poor objects of exploitation. If accepted, it can make way for new constructions that support the sustainability and egalitarianism that we prize. We can stop employing the machine metaphor and construct a new one. We have that in our power. This way of thinking challenges the mechanistic philosophy’s new form of order, as Merchant explained it. It does not challenge, however, the mechanistic philosophy’s new form of power. The idea that power is “derived from active and immediate intervention in a secularized world” is not undermined, but rather, reinforced.

If this seems like a dead-end path of inquiry, that’s because any other conception of human power is unimaginable. “As the unifying model for science and society,” Merchant writes, “the machine has permeated and reconstituted human consciousness so totally that today we scarcely question its validity.” It is “our everyday, common sense reality” (193). That was thirty-five years ago. Since then, the amount of heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere has doubled.

This makes me wonder whether Merchant’s socially-sensitive mode of historical analysis was radical enough. Can we really look at history with from an “earth’s eye view” (42), in the same way we can look from the perspective of women, laboring people, and people of color? Can we grant nature “rights,” in the same way we grant rights to other human beings? Nature may not be an “it,” but it isn’t quite a “thou,” either. To think that way is intuitive, and it speaks clearly to our desire for alternative forms of order. To alternative forms of power it speaks less clearly. The emphasis remains on differentiation, on bodies of interest in “masculine” competition, rather than on undifferentiated (allegedly) feminine unity. For the contemporary mind, the modern creed of human power remains the “active and immediate intervention in a secularized world.” Might such power be surrendered? The notion is barely tolerable. The human “fix,” technological or otherwise, is still the final bulwark against giving up in despair and doing nothing.

3416. Book Review: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution

By Kevin C. Armitage, H-Net, September 2000

In their classic work Dialectic of Enlightenment, German Critical Theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argued that the Western project of enlightened thought -- which they distinguished from "the Enlightenment" as a historic period -- conflated the technical domination of nature with the social domination of people. The values of calculation, quantification, and exchange that form the heart of bourgeois thinking are essential to social processes that seek to master nature. Moreover, the drive for domination that Horkheimer and Adorno found at the core of western reason contained a gendered dimension. Enlightened man's quest to overcome the primitive forces of nature demanded that he deploy entrepreneurial power over men and patriarchal power over women and children. Horkheimer and Adorno thus argued that critical investigations into the western project of mastery of nonhuman nature must recognize the dimensions of human domination intertwined into the drive to subjugate the green world.

Carolyn Merchant's distinguished text The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution engaged in just such a critical investigation as it endeavored to reveal the historic connection between the domination of nature and women. Merchant explained that her volume sought "to examine the values associated with the images of women and nature as they relate to the formation of our modern world and their implications for our lives today" (p. xxi). The "implications for our lives today" provided the moral grounding for this work in which Merchant advocated the need to "reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that, by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women" (p. xxi). The core of the book, then, is a "broad synthesis" that examined the social and ecological changes wrought by the new images of nature associated with the Scientific Revolution. The premodern, organic view of a feminine natural world gave way to a mechanistic cosmology that perceived the green world of nature as inert matter, a machine available to human manipulation.

Some readers will remain skeptical at Merchant's compressed depiction of a premodern European philosophical outlook that unified nature and culture; however, Merchant acknowledged the diversity of premodern thought and that early Europeans "quarried the mountainsides, altered the landscape, and overgrazed the hills" (p. 3). Yet Merchant persuasively argued that the dominant feminine, organic theory of nature prominent in many ancient systems of knowledge shaped the governing metaphors that helped regulate human behavior toward the earth. Thus writers such as the Roman compiler Pliny cautioned against deep mining, citing earthquakes as Mother Nature's indignation at such intrusive violations. Moreover, Pliny warned that the mining of gold corrupted mankind thereby contributing to the avarice that fueled robberies, murders and wars. Europeans still followed Pliny's admonitions as late as the sixteenth century, enough so that a proponent of mining such as Georg Agricola felt it necessary to refute them in his 1556 work De Re Metallica ("On Metals").

Organic conceptions of nature that emphasized interrelationships and organic unity rather than hierarchy and mastery lent themselves to social ideologies based upon democratic values. (Merchant noted that organicism and mechanism later fused in the form of twentieth-century totalitarianism.) Thus the premodern connection between women and nature infused utopian thought such as Tommaso Campanella's 1602 work City of the Sun, which envisioned an organic society characterized by communal sharing of goods, property and knowledge. Conversely, when popular images of the green world stressed the disorderly nature of illnesses, storms and ruined crops, ideologies that emphasized the need to control both nature and women rose to prominence. Niccolo Machiavelli's injunction to conquer a wild and feminine Fortune exemplified a philosophy of domination that encompassed nature and women. The ideological conflation of social and natural disorder similarly informed attitudes toward witchcraft. Merchant argued that, "the disorder symbolized in the macrocosm by the dissolution of the frame of nature and the uncivilized wilderness of the new world, in society by the witch who controlled the forces of nature and the women who overturned its order...heralded the death of the old order of nature" (p. 148).

The death of the old order of nature came at the hands of the newly developing capitalist economic system of the sixteenth century and the mechanistic ideology that sanctioned its worldly activity. The chief ideologists of the new program were Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. Bacon's view that religion and science were engaged in a mutual effort to compensate for the damage done to humanity by the expulsion from Paradise valorized the tendencies toward growth and technological innovation inherent in early capitalism. Descartes' mechanism furthered the Baconian program by effectively removing spirit from nature and the human body, positing that external objects consisted solely of quantities.

Moreover, Merchant observed that "In France, the rise of the mechanical world view was coincident with a general tendency toward central governmental control and the concentration of power in the hands of the royal ministers" (p. 205). The relationship between mechanistic philosophy and hierarchical social orders continued with the abstract materialism of Thomas Hobbes, who relied upon mechanical models of society to solve philosophical difficulties associated with disorder in his Leviathan.

After assessing such ideas, Merchant contended that the mechanistic philosophies of nature which easily associated with hierarchy and social power "sanctioned the management of both nature and society"(p. 235). Contemporary examples of mechanism include the utilitarian conservation movement, which Merchant characterized as an "adaptation of the rationalizing tendencies inherent in mechanism applied to the natural environment" (p. 238). Like its contemporary counterpart, however, early modern mechanisms spurred countervailing philosophies such as the vitalism of Anne Conway (1631-1679) that remained rooted in an organic worldview and articulated no essential differences between spirit and body. Indeed, Conway, whose writings exerted a great influence on what Merchant termed the "dynamic vitalism" of Leibniz, argued for the interdependence of all creatures under God, unified in a central spirit that governed all things. Merchant noted the many philosophical deficiencies of vitalism, yet given contemporary ecological dilemmas that arise in part from the lack of organic value systems, concluded that "we might regret that the mechanists did not take their vitalistic critics more seriously" (p. 268).

Despite the originality and many successes of Merchant's book, informed first-time and repeat readers will surely wish to differ with some of its assertions. Merchant's reconstruction of a premodern culture that posited an organic and harmonious nature and culture remains problematic. Her depiction of historical causality also feels simplified, even if one acknowledges the need for concise representations of the complex philosophical traditions that comprise the largest part of her evidence. Too, other readers will surely quibble with the interpretations of various figures and her perhaps excessively ambitious thesis; for example, Merchant's assertion of connections between mechanism and the social subordination of women remains somewhat speculative, even to the sympathetic reader.

Yet twenty years after its initial publication The Death of Nature continues to impress most readers with the vitality of its argument and its sophisticated embodiment of the type of historically and theoretically informed scholarship advocated by thinkers such as Horkheimer and Adorno. Indeed, the strongest parts of Merchant's message resonate now more than ever: surely our current era of capitalist triumphalism and globalization calls for both ecological analysis and thoughtful criticisms of positivist models of knowledge. The ethical components of Merchant's work also continue to demand our attention. Her implication that holistic ecology can extend democratic principles toward nonhuman life carries the reader directly into the wide-ranging moral issues informing the human relationship with nonhuman nature.

Finally, Merchant's book helped shape many of the core issues of the two disciplines in which it is firmly canonized. Environmental historians continue to investigate and debate the role of ideas in shaping the human relationship with nature, and, perhaps most importantly, continue to criticize economies from an ecological perspective. Similarly, ecofeminists have furthered Merchant's vital investigations into the gendered interactions of people and nature and her moral concern with participatory democracy. Such issues remain essential to these and other disciplines, and thereby ensure the continued relevance of The Death of Nature. Merchants ambitious text, then, despite its shortcomings, continues to reward both new and repeat readers because it speaks in a critical and engaging manner to some of the most pressing intellectual, moral, and political issues of our time.

Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.

3415. Why Does California Have So Many Wildfires?

By Kendra Pierre-Louis and John Schwartz, The New York Times, august 22, 2020

79 wildfires in northern California at this time; over 1 million acres burned sofar. 

More than 400,000 acres have been burned in Northern and Central California, with many of the fires set off by nearly 11,000 lightning strikes. High temperatures and strong winds have made the situation even worse.

Evacuation orders in Santa Cruz County covered 48,000 people, including the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and those being evacuated must weigh the risks of seeking refuge in evacuation shelters in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. People living far beyond the burn zone are struggling with the smoke, and beloved sites like Big Basin Redwoods State Park have been badly damaged.

What is it about California that makes wildfires so catastrophic? There are four key ingredients.

The (changing) climate

The first is California’s climate.

“Fire, in some ways, is a very simple thing,” said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “As long as stuff is dry enough and there’s a spark, then that stuff will burn.”

California, like much of the West, gets most of its moisture in the fall and winter. Its vegetation then spends much of the summer slowly drying out because of a lack of rainfall and warmer temperatures. That vegetation then serves as kindling for fires.

But while California’s climate has always been fire prone, the link between climate change and bigger fires is inextricable. “Behind the scenes of all of this, you’ve got temperatures that are about two to three degrees Fahrenheit warmer now than they would’ve been without global warming,” Dr. Williams said. That dries out vegetation even more, making it more likely to burn.

California’s fire record dates back to 1932; the 10 largest fires since then have occurred since 2000, including the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest in state history, and this year’s L.N.U. Lightning Complex, which is burning west of Sacramento.

“In pretty much every single way, a perfect recipe for fire is just kind of written in California,” Dr. Williams said. “Nature creates the perfect conditions for fire, as long as people are there to start the fires. But then climate change, in a few different ways, seems to also load the dice toward more fire in the future.”

People

Even if the conditions are right for a wildfire, you still need something or someone to ignite it. Sometimes the trigger is nature, like a lightning strike, but more often than not humans are responsible.

“Many of these large fires that you’re seeing in Southern California and impacting the areas where people are living are human-caused,” said Nina S. Oakley, a research scientist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, in a 2018 interview speaking about the historic fires at that time.

Many deadly fires have been started by downed power lines. The 2018 Carr Fire, the state’s sixth-largest on record, started when a truck blew out its tire and its rim scraped the pavement, sending out sparks.

The L.N.U. Lightning Complex fire tore through the property of Bill Nichols, 84, who worked to tamp out flames in Vacaville, Calif., on Wednesday.Credit...Noah Berger/Associated Press

“California has a lot of people and a really long dry season,” Dr. Williams said. “People are always creating possible sparks, and as the dry season wears on and stuff is drying out more and more, the chance that a spark comes off a person at the wrong time just goes up. And that’s putting aside arson.”

There’s another way people have contributed to wildfires: in their choices of where to live. People are increasingly moving into areas near forests, known as the urban-wildland interface, that are inclined to burn.

Fire suppression

It’s counterintuitive, but the United States’ history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.

“For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States,” Dr. Williams said. “And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn’t burn. And so over the last hundred years we’ve had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.

“And so in a lot of California now when fires start, those fires are burning through places that have a lot more plants to burn than they would have if we had been allowing fires to burn for the last hundred years.”

In recent years, the United States Forest Service has been trying to rectify the previous practice through the use of prescribed or “controlled” burns.

The Santa Ana winds

The second stage of this year’s fire season is yet to come.

Each fall, strong gusts known as the Santa Ana winds bring dry air from the Great Basin area of the West into Southern California, said Fengpeng Sun, an assistant professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Dr. Sun is a co-author of a 2015 study that suggests that California has two distinct fire seasons. One, which runs from June through September and is driven by a combination of warmer and drier weather, is the Western fire season that most people think of. Those wildfires tend to be more inland, in higher-elevation forests.

But Dr. Sun and his co-authors also identified a second fire season that runs from October through April and is driven by the Santa Ana winds. Those fires tend to spread three times faster and burn closer to urban areas, and they were responsible for 80 percent of the economic losses over two decades beginning in 1990.

It’s not just that the Santa Ana winds dry out vegetation; they also move embers around, spreading fires.

Which brings us back to climate change.

Ultimately, determining the links between any individual fire and climate change takes time, and analysis from the evolving discipline of attribution science. But the effects of the greenhouse gases humans produce underlie everything that occurs in the atmosphere, and the tendency of climate change to make dry places more dry over time is a warning to the West of a fiery future.

3414. Book Review: Dialectics of Nature

By George Novack (William F. Warde), Fourth International, December 1940

The ideological development of every social movement has followed the course determined by the material conditions of its existence. The evolution of scientific thought under proletarian auspices has been the opposite of that under bourgeois auspices. This difference in development grew out of the different social necessities which confronted the two revolutionary classes in the first stages of their careers.

The main line of bourgeois thought advanced from the natural to the social sciences. The earliest bourgeois philosophers were primarily concerned with promoting man’s knowledge of nature after the long sleep of the middle ages. They had no interest in reforming society along bourgeois lines. They devised new intellectual methods for increasing man’s power over nature rather than for decreasing the power of man over man.

Lord Bacon, the progenitor of English empiricism, deliberately turned his back upon the religious controversies, in which great political struggles then first manifested themselves, to investigate the workings of nature. Descartes, the founder of modern rationalism, opposed to the sterile “speculative” philosophy of the schoolmen his own “practical philosophy,” which would make mankind “masters and possessors of nature” and enable them to “enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth and all its comforts.” Newton gave a classical form to physics a century and a half before Ricardo performed the same task for bourgeois economics.
 

Material Causes of Intellectual Evolution

This order of development was not accidental. The principal task of the bourgeoisie at that period was to augment the productive forces, thereby increasing their own wealth and power. The scientific thought of the proletarian movement, on the other hand, has progressed from the social to the natural sciences. This, too, was not without sufficient reason. The urgent job of the proletariat under capitalist domination was less to increase the productive forces of society, as the bourgeoisie was compelled to do under feudal rule, than to free the already highly developed productive forces from the dead hand of capitalist ownership and control.

This explains why Marxism, the scientific method of the revolutionary proletarian movement, concentrated attention in the first phase of its activity upon the solution of historical, social and economic problems. Practical necessity dictated that the most pressing theoretical problems in the sphere of social phenomena be solved first. Although the theory of dialectical materialism was essentially a universal system of thought, embracing both nature and society, its detailed application to the theoretical problems of the natural sciences had to be postponed for later consideration.
 

Marx, Engels, and Natural Science

The creators of dialectical materialism were keenly conscious of the gaps in their theoretical work. Marx looked forward to writing a handbook of dialectics after he had completed Capital. In the latter years of his life Engels made a comprehensive study of mathematics and the natural sciences with the aid of reconstructing their theoretical foundations with the aid of the materialist dialectics just as he and Marx had previously revolutionized social science.

“Marx and I,” he wrote in the second preface to Anti-Duehring, “were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history. But a knowledge of mathematics and natural science is essential to a conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist. Marx was well versed in mathematics, but we could only partially, intermittently and sporadically keep up with the natural sciences. For this reason, when I retired from business and transferred my home to London, thus enabling myself to give the necessary time to it, I went through as complete as possible a ‘moulting,’ as Liebig calls it, in mathematics and the natural sciences, and spent the best part of eight years on it.”

Anti-Duehring was the first fruit of this work; Dialectics of Nature the last. While Anti-Duehring remains the best exposition of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, the Dialectics of Nature, despite its fragmentary character, must now be read as its indispensable supplement. Engels could not finish this work owing to the tremendous labor involved in editing and publishing Capital (here is direct evidence of the interference of social science with the advancement of natural science!) and to other tasks connected with the revolutionary movement. The present volume consists of six more or less completed chapters together with a sheaf of disconnected notes and separate articles.

Although it has taken over sixty years for Engels’ manuscript to appear in English, it arrives at an opportune moment. Here is one more means for educating those students who have felt the need of delving deeper into the theoretical bases of Marxism and of answering those critics who have demanded to know how the doctrines and methods of dialectical materialism can be applied to the problems of natural science. Doubtless, the new school of petty-bourgeois revisionists, whose disdain for Marxist theory is surpassed only by their ignorance of it, will attach little more positive value to these writings than did their predecessor, Edward Bernstein, who held the manuscript for many decades after Engels’ death without seeing any necessity for publishing it. But every serious student of Marxist thought will rejoice that these keys to an understanding of the materialist dialectic have finally become accessible.
 

What Engels Seeks to Demonstrate

In the Dialectics of Nature Engels aimed to demonstrate that the processes of nature obey the same general laws of motion as social and intellectual processes. As he wrote in Anti-Duehring, Engels surveyed mathematics and the natural sciences to convince himself “that amid the welter of innumerable changes taking place in nature, the same dialectical laws are in operation as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws as those which similarly form the thread running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to consciousness in the mind of man ...” and which were first formulated by Hegel in mystical form before Marx and Engels refashioned them into the materialist dialectic.

In the Introduction, Engels presents a critical review of the development of natural science on its theoretical side. He explains how and why this first period in the rebirth of natural knowledge was dominated by the viewpoint of the absolute immutability of nature. The fixed stars and our own solar system, the earth and its fauna and flora were considered to be eternally the same. There was no place in such a scheme of things for the idea of universal evolution.

This outlook, which prevailed in all branches of natural science until well into the 19th century, began to be undermined in one science after another by the internal development of the sciences themselves. In astronomy, by the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the evolution of the solar system from a nebula; in geology, by Lyell’s conception of the successive transformations of the earth s surface; in physics, by the formulation of the mechanical theory of heat and by the law of the conservation of energy; in chemistry, by Mendeleyeff’s discovery of the periodic arrangement of the elements; and in biology by Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. This series of discoveries gave rise to a new scientific conception of nature, the theory of universal evolution, “the view that the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from protista to men, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change.”

The full consequences of these revolutionary developments in the separate sciences, which shattered the old picture of an immutable nature, were slow to realize themselves in the conscious thought of individual natural scientists and in genial scientific theory. Practising scientists, who accepted the results and pursued the methods of the evolutionary standpoint in their special department of activity, clung to the old metaphysical ways of thinking in other fields of thought and in their general conceptions.
 

The Dialectical Theory of Evolution

Meanwhile the new and higher stage of natural knowledge demanded a theoretical system and a method of thought appropriate to itself. The old mechanical system of nature with its unchangeable laws and elements and its metaphysical mode of thought operating with inflexible and exclusive categories no longer sufficed.

It was a philosopher rather than a scientist who provided natural science with the intellectual means for its emancipation from the old outlook and for the construction of a new one. Just as Descartes had outlined the mechanical system of nature, so Hegel formulated the first systematic conception of the whole natural, social and spiritual world as a continuous process of development.

In his dialectical logic Hegel attempted to give a rational form and evolve a rational method out of the many-sided, contradictory processes of evolution. The laws of his dialectic are nothing but the most general laws of motion and change in nature, society and human thought. These laws were originally conceived by Hegel in idealist fashion as mere laws of thought. But, as Marx and Engels subsequently demonstrated in their materialist version of dialectical logic, the dialectical laws are conceptual formulations of objective material realities.
 

Three Laws of Dialectics

Engels discusses three principal laws of dialectics: the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; the law of the interpenetration of opposites; and the law of the negation of the negation. He takes the experimental results of the individual sciences, sifts and synthesizes them, to show that these dialectical laws are really laws of development in nature and therefore valid for theoretical natural science.

The first law signifies that “in nature, in a manner exactly fixed for each individual case, qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion (so-called energy).” In the second chapter Engels indicates precisely how this law operates by numerous examples taken from the exact sciences of mechanics, physics, and chemistry where accurately measurable and traceable quantitative variations are directly linked with the production of qualitative differences. In physics, it has since been ascertained, there exists a continuous series of rays from radio to cosmic rays in which quantitative variations in wavelength manifest themselves in determinable qualitative differences. This same law is equally clearly observable in chemistry where the properties of bodies are altered in concordance with their changed quantitative composition. Engels cites the allotropic forms of elements, the nitrogen oxide compounds, the homologous series of carbon compounds, and the periodic arrangement of the elements according to their atomic weights; modern chemists could add many more examples.

The second law of the dialectic asserts that everything has a self-contradictory character, containing within itself its own opposite. The bi-polar essence of all things manifests itself in change, which is a process of alteration, or transformation of something from its original state through a series of intermediate variations into its opposite. Engels brings forward this law of the interpenetration of opposites in the third chapter where he investigates the most important of scientific problems, the basic forms of motion.
 

The Nature of Motion

All natural knowledge is based upon the study of material movement of one kind or another. A correct conception of motion is therefore absolutely indispensable to natural science. What is motion? Motion, says Engels, is a contradictory combination of attraction and repulsion. All the various forms of motion arise out of the interplay between these two opposing phases of its being. Wherever and whenever motion occurs throughout nature, these polar opposites will be found inseparably united. This dialectical definition of motion already implicitly contains the empirically discovered physical law of the conservation of energy. For, if each individual attraction is compensated for by a corresponding repulsion somewhere else, then the sum of all attractions in the universe must be equal to the sum of all repulsions.

Motion consists of the concrete unity of attraction and repulsion. Through their interaction with one another, and their transmutation into one another, the diverse modes of motion in nature are produced. The universal interplay of attraction and repulsion can be seen in the simplest kind of motion, mechanical motion, which consists of a change of place on the part of any body. Since motion is always relative, change of place requires the interaction of at least two bodies to manifest itself. When two bodies act upon each other so that a change of place of one or both of them results, this change of place can consist only of an approach or separation. But the movement of one body toward another involves the overcoming of the repulsion that separates them, and vice-versa. Moreover, the attraction of one body to another involves its repulsion from a third body. Thus all change of place necessarily entails the reciprocal action of attraction and repulsion and their replacement by one another.

The mechanical movements of masses on the earth’s surface can be resolved into the centripetal force of gravitation and counteracting centrifugal forces. The same interpenetration of attraction and repulsion is displayed in the mutual movements of the heavenly bodies, as in the dynamic equilibrium maintained between the earth and sun. If the earth were not bound to the sun by attraction, it would leave the solar system and fly off into space. If the sun, on the other hand, did not exert constant repulsion in the form of radiant energy upon the earth and keep it at a distance, this planet would long ago have fallen into its flaming mass and become absorbed.

Every mode of motion in nature from the lowest to the highest, from simple mechanical motion to complicated organic behavior, embraces and arises out of the simultaneous action and reaction of attraction and repulsion. Motion is in fact nothing but the most general expression for the manifold series of forms in which these polar opposites manifest themselves.
 

The Dialectical Definition of Motion

Engels employs this dialectical, two-sided, comprehensive definition of motion to criticize and to correct the one-sided conceptions of the nature of motion prevailing in Newtonian physics. The Newtonians erred in making attraction, or gravitation, the fundamental form of motion in nature. They thereby disregarded the equally important role of its opposite, repulsion, overlooking in particular the transformations of the one phase of motion into the other. Engels undertakes an analysis of the concepts of force, energy, and work in the writings of Helmholtz, the great nineteenth-century German physicist, to demonstrate how this neglect of the essentially bipolar character of motion introduced confusion and perpetuated error in physical theory.

Since Engels wrote, the fact that motion embraces both attraction and repulsion has been strikingly verified by the electronic theory of matter, the physical theory of relativity, and, as Haldane points out, by recent developments in the astronomical theory of the spiral nebulae. In the principles of the new “wave mechanics” the dialectical law of the interpenetration of opposites has just scored a great victory over the old mechanical conceptions.

This triumph is all the more definitive because it has been so long and consciously resisted by the physicists themselves. When first they found that electronic phenomena exhibited the properties of both waves and particles, they were profoundly perplexed by this contradiction, which could not be reconciled nor explained by the sundered categories of mechanical theory. Subatomic theory became deadlocked. After much pondering, the most daring physicists have now at last concluded that in the subatomic world waves and particles can no longer be considered absolute opposites; that they can be united in a single entity; that they can possess the same properties; and that, under certain conditions, they can be transformed into one another.
 

The Negation of the Negation

The law of the negation of the negation, which Hegel used as the fundamental law for the construction of his whole system of thought, has a far wider sphere of application in the system of nature. This law really expresses the fundamental form of development in nature.

The opposing forces at work in every single thing bring, about constant changes in its constitution. These changes accumulate in quantity until, at a certain determinate stage in the process of development, a distinct qualitative transformation or leap occurs. The thing loses its original identity and passes over into its opposite.

But the evolutionary process does not halt at the point of simple negation. The new form of material existence is no less self-contradictory than the old and subject to the same internal restlessness. The first negation in turn undergoes self-differentiation and division until it, too, passes into its own opposite and thereby becomes negated. The final result of this process is called the negation of the negation, a synthetic unity which has discarded the transitional forms but preserved within itself the essential content of both sides of the contradictory whole.

All the transformations of material motion studied by natural science exemplify the working of this law of the negation of the negation in physical reality. Engels employs the law to clarify the interconnections between mechanical and molecular motion, or heat.
 

Mechanical into Molecular Motion

All the various forms of motion are generated, as we have said, through the interplay of attraction and repulsion and their conversion into one another. But in each specific mode of motion one or the other extreme is predominant. Pure mechanical motion is essentially a form of attraction. Although repulsion is necessarily present in all cases of mechanical motion, it exists in a negative or passive state. The active role is played by attraction.

As a form of attraction, mechanical motion is the negation of repulsion. But it contains within itself the possibility of transformation into its opposite. This dialectical development actually occurs in nature through the contact or collision of one body with another. In the resultant friction or impact, part of the pure mechanical motion of the masses is destroyed and reappears in the form of internal molecular motion, or heat. The heat produced by the application of brakes is an everyday instance of this phenomenon.

Heat, however, which agitates and separates the molecules of solid bodies, is a form of repulsion. In the case of heat, repulsion comes forward as the active, and attraction recedes into the passive, side of the material process. The conversion of mechanical motion into heat is therefore a negation of the negation, a reversion of the material motion to the original state of repulsion, but on a higher level of development.
 

Dialectics of Scientific Discovery

The law of the negation of the negation is manifested, not only in the physical process of the conversion of mechanical motion into heat, but also in the history of its discovery. Mankind long ago actually converted mechanical motion into heat, first by the instinctive act of rubbing the body with the hands to keep it warm, and then by making fire from friction. But this negation of the original positive form of mechanical motion was only the first step in the dialectics of the process. In order to complete the development, mankind had to reverse the process and convert heat into mechanical motion.

This second stage, the negation of the negation, was realized only after many thousands of years through the invention of the steam-engine, which is an apparatus for converting heat into useable mechanical motion. In this instance historical human practice in the realm of technology provides proof of the logical law of the negation of the negation.

Here also is proof that “the dialectics of the brain is only the reflection of the form of motion of the real world, both in nature and history.” The law of the negation of the negation would not have forced its way into conscious thought unless it had already been operative in physical processes and in social life.
 

Mechanics Versus Dialectics

Yet, as Engels points out, even after the problem of converting mechanical motion into heat and heat back again into mechanical motion had been solved in human practice, natural scientists failed to formulate this fact in a completely correct or comprehensive theoretical fashion. At first they regarded heat, like electricity, as a special kind of imponderable substance rather than as a mode of material motion. Then, when they recognized heat as a mode of motion, both in the restricted law of the mechanical equivalent of heat and in the general law of the conservation of energy, they expressed the inter-relations between these two modes of motion exclusively from the one-sided standpoint of quantity.

But mechanical and molecular motion are not only quantitatively but qualitatively related. They are different forms of the same material motion. Dialectical materialism shows its superiority to the mechanical viewpoint because, in addition to comprehending the quantitative identity between the two forms of motion, formulated by the law of the quantitative equivalence of motion through all its changes of form, it also explains their qualitative diversity and the manner of their mutual metamorphoses.

Dialectical materialism has a different conception of the main task of natural science than the exponents of the mechanical school whose ideas have prevailed in natural scientific thought since Descartes and Newton. The mechanicians, who were preoccupied with studying the laws of the passage of bodies through space, believed that the goal of science was to reduce all other forms of material motion into the elementary form of mechanical motion, to resolve the higher modes of motion into the lower, the more complex into the simple. Thus, in the introduction to his Principia, Newton wrote:

“It would be desirable to deduce from the elements of mechanics the remaining phenomena of nature.”

This conception of the ultimate aim of natural science coincided with that relatively primitive level of technology and industry which was principally concerned with utilizing and exploiting machines in which one aspect of mechanical movement (potential energy) was transformed into another (kinetic energy). Scientific thought revolved within the same narrow circle as scientific practice, generalizing the changes within one single simple form of motion, mechanical transposition.

Hand in hand with the tremendous advances in technology and large-scale industry during the past two centuries, scientists have discovered, investigated, and put to work many other kinds of material motion, thermal, electro-magnetical, chemical, and so on. They have especially applied themselves to studying the interconnections and transformations of these modes of motion into one another. Scientists now know that, while these other forms of motion are always bound up with real mechanical motion, they cannot be reduced to it without obliterating their specific characteristics. The laws of physiology, or society, or thought, although based upon the fundamental laws of nature, cannot simply be “deduced from the elements of mechanics,” as Newton anticipated.

On all sides the laws governing mechanical motion are seen to have their limits; they have lost their sovereign status. [1] The expansion of technical, industrial, and purely scientific practice has widened the theoretical horizon of science far beyond the old mechanical ideal, presenting an immensely broader view of its task which dialectical materialism has not only recognized but best formulated.
 

The Dialectical Conception of Science

This new conception is epoch-making. In contrast to the mechanical standpoint, dialectical materialism regards the task of science to be, not the reduction of all modes of motion into one, but the study of the main forms of material motion in their natural sequence, dialectical interconnections, and transformations into one another.

The forms of motion range all the way from the crude mechanical motion of masses to the complex activity of thought in the human brain. In the course of material evolution all these different modes of motion, mechanical, molecular, atomic, electronic, chemical, thermal, organic, social, and intellectual, have developed one out of the other through the interplay of attraction and repulsion, the original contradictory essence of motion. They constitute an inter-related, hierarchical series, each one of which is naturally linked with the others, and capable, under proper material conditions, of being converted into one another.

This conception provides for the first time a sound material basis for the systematic classification of the sciences. Each individual science either analyses a separate form of motion (chemistry) or the interconnections between several forms of motion (electro-chemistry). The essential order of the sciences corresponds to the order of the generation of the various forms of motion in nature and their dialectical transition into one another. Thus dialectical materialism introduces a new principle of order to replace the confusion and anarchy which has reigned in scientific thought since the bankruptcy of the old mechanical system. All the diverse departments of human knowledge from astronomy to logic are correlated into one vast synthesis.

Part of the material in the Dialectics of Nature, as of any treatise on natural knowledge written over sixty years ago, has been rendered obsolete by the subsequent progress of the physical sciences. This is particularly true of the chapter on electricity in which the greatest advances have been made in the past half-century. Yet there is remarkably little chaff in these pages. Engels’ observations were pointed in the right direction and have in many instances been confirmed by the further researches of the physical sciences. Each discussion of a specific question is of enduring value as an example of the way to use the concepts of materialist dialectics as instruments of critical thought in the natural as well as in the social sciences.
 

The Task That Awaits Us

The task of delineating the dialectical character of natural events, which Engels set for himself and failed to finish, still waits to be accomplished. Despite the wealth of materials provided by recent revolutionary developments within the natural sciences, that task stands at approximately the point where Engels left it. The theoreticians of the post-Marxian period – Bernstein, Kautsky, Adler, etc. – possessing the same hostility or indifference toward the philosophy of dialectical materialism as our contemporary anti-dialecticians, had neither the equipment nor incentive to do anything along this line. Lenin’s Materialism and Empiric-Criticism and his notebooks on Hegel’s logic made possible a renaissance of the philosophy of Marxism and cleared a path for the extension of its ideas and methods to the problems confronting physical science.

It was to be hoped that, when the Bolsheviks commanded state power in Russia, their scientific leaders and academies would undertake this task on a collective, as well as an individual, basis. Under Lenin’s sponsorship promising beginnings were made. But these were cut short by the reaction. Unalloyed Marxist thought, banished from politics, could hardly be expected to extend its roots into the subsoil of nature or to flourish freely for any length of time under the baneful shadow of Stalin’s regime. Consequently, Marxism shrivelled from a vigorously growing ideological movement into a sterile scholasticism.

The Stalinists might preserve some relics of past Marxist thought as the medieval schoolmen preserved the writings of Aristotle or as they themselves mummified Lenin’s body: to exhibit the decaying glories of the past while violating their spirit in the present. For this reason we owe the publication of Dialectics of Nature to them. In science as in society remnants of the heritage of the October Revolution are here and there embedded within Stalinism; some good can still emanate from this abomination: a contradiction which will doubtless horrify the anti-dialecticians. But under Stalinist auspices there cannot be any consistent or fruitful development of the science of dialectical materialism.

In this domain of thought, as in all others, the forces of the Fourth International are obliged to carry forward the tasks left unfinished by their Marxist forerunners. In the philosophical works of Marx and Engels, and now in the Dialectics of Nature, they will find the main trails already blazed for them.

Dialectics of Nature by Frederick Engels, Translated by C.P. Dutt

Preface and Notes by J.B.S. Haldane, FRS 383 pages. International Publishers, New York, 1940. $2.50.

Footnote 

1. See, for example, The Evolution of Physics by Einstein and Infeld, especially the section on The Decline of the Mechanical View.