Publication Details

Abstract

This study is devoted to the problem o£ the relation between dialectics as a way of thinking and objective dialectics. The traditional conception, according to which objective reality is dialectical in itself, is considered by the present author, from the standpoint of the requirements of dialectics itself, as questionable and hardly justifiable. The author's starting point is that the question of whether dialectics of objective reality corresponds to the dialectical way of thinking must be solved from the standpoint of the reqirements of dialectics itself. That means, in the present case, the standpoint of materialistically comprehended dialectics. On the one hand, it must be recognized that dialectics as a way thinking cannot be only a creation of subject (that would be an idealism); on the other hand, however,, it cannot be concluded, on the basis of this way of thinking, that objective reality is dialectical in itself. It is not possible to deduce from a mechanistic conception of the world that the world behaves mechanistically (though this conception also arose as a consequence ot cognizing objective reality); similarly, neither dialectics as a method can be evidence that we apprehended the world completely and that the world is dialectical. The requirement to understand our knowledge dialectically, and the philosophical conception of the world as historically conditioned, refers also to the requirement itself, thus pointing out also to its conditionality. Of course, by emphasizing historical conditionality of konwledge, dialectics conserves, at the same time, its existence. This conservation holds, however, its negative form. Just through this negativity, dialectics exist as a self-restoring system. At the same time, this negativeness of dialectics does not enable us to consider the world as dialectic only. The negativeness of dialectics depends, of course, on an ontological presupposition of qualitative unexhaustibility of the world. However, in this aspect of dialectics, this is the only positive assertion about the world. Otherwise dialectics, in the sense of negativity, is, above all, a matter of our way of thinking.