A
Dialectical-Materialist View of Progressive
Development
in the Physical World
One
of the most difficult questions faced by contemporary dialectical materialism
is the concept of progressive development in the world of nature. The
applicability of the term “progressive” to particular stages in the
evolutionary development in the biological world is till problematical. In the
case of the physical world, such applicability is even more problematical.
In
the social sphere, dialectical materialists and the various Marxist groups with
which they are usually associated politically and ideologically make frequent
use of the term “progressive.” They view their well-known goal orientation as
not simply emerging from their consciousness, but from the operation of
objective laws of social development. These laws not only exist independently
of our consciousness, but, among other things, are ultimately responsible for
our consciousness, including our consciousness of the existence of these laws.
Consequently, in the social sphere, “progress” represents any tendency or
motion along the general path to which these laws propel society, with humans
serving as the actors. Regression, then, is motion taking society backward in
the zigzag of history. Such backward motion is viewed as only temporary, the
former social conditions reappearing in their essential content, differing only
in a superficial or phenomenal way from the situation that had formerly
occurred. The laws that propelled society to the point before the regressive
stage began are once more responsible for propelling society forward again.
In
this context, then, a step or advocacy of a step that contributes to social development
along the forward direction is considered progressive. The term therefore
acquires both a subjective and an objective character. It is subjective insofar
as the actions of an individual or group of individuals are a consequence of
conscious behavior on the basis of a theoretical understanding, however
rudimentary, of the direction of development of society. It is objective in the
sense that the step taken or advocated is a stage in the evolutionary
development of society within the framework of a law-governed process that
arises independently of consciousness. The paradox resulting from the assertion
that a consciously directed action is independent of consciousness was
explained by the materialist view: “The mode of production of material life conditions
the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary,
their social being that determines their consciousness.”1 This
concept is unique to dialectical materialism, which regards society as a form
of matter, namely, social matter. It is material, since human beings are
material objects; it is social, as distinct, say, from physical, because the
significant properties of such matter for the social sciences are social
relations, rather than the physical properties of mass, volume, temperature,
and the like.
Evolutionary
development of society is thus seen as a particular case of the more general
process of the evolutionary development of material systems.
In
the dialectical-materialist worldview, the subject matter of philosophy is the
most general laws of development of material systems and the theoretical
reproduction of these systems in our minds. The question we wish to consider is
whether the concept “progressive development” is a general philosophical
category applicable to processes in the physical world as well as to processes
of social development, or whether it is a specialized category of the social
sciences. In other words, we wish to explore whether the concept of progress is
strictly anthropomorphic or whether such a concept is applicable to the sphere
of nature.
It
will be necessary for our purpose to distinguish the concept of change from
that of development
In
dialectical philosophy, “motion” and “change” are usually interchangeable
terms. Dialectical materialism generally follows Aristotelian dialectics in
regarding change or motion as the realization of the potential—an object
becomes what it potentially is but which it was not, and ceases being what it
was. This view sets into dialectical opposition the categories of state and motion, in which motion is the transition between states. Thus, a
system in one state undergoes transformation into another state.2
More precisely, however, motion is not simply
the act of the accomplished transformation, but a process: the process of
leaving one state and entering another. Materialist dialectics, however, places
particular stress on asserting the primacy of motion over state, motion being
absolute and unceasing, the states between which the motion occurs being
relative and transitory.
In
this framework, then, a system in which the states reoccur repeatedly, that is,
a cyclical process, can be considered both as a system in motion as well as a
system in an unchanging state of motion. It is essentially because of this
contradictory character (contradictory in the dialectical sense, not in the
formal- logical sense) that physics views reversible processes as qualitatively
distinct from irreversible processes. On one level of organization and
integration of a material system, a reversible process is taken to be a form of
motion, while on another level, a reversible process is taken to be a state.
(The passage of philosophical categories into one another is another
characteristic of the dialectical view of philosophical categories.3)
When a system undergoes irreversible qualitative change, the character of the
motion is different. Two general tendencies are apparent. One tendency is
characterized by the increase in entropy, that is, the existing ordered
structure undergoes some degree of disordering or randomization. Another
tendency that appears is just the opposite–more highly ordered structures
evolve with greater or lesser rapidity from structures of lower order. Prigogene, for example, has associated the formation of
some higher structures with the spontaneous motion of systems far from
equilibrium. In this way, he has shown how ordered structures can appear within
a system which, as a whole, is increasing in entropy. He has given the example
of water, which forms structures called eddies when flowing down an incline of
sufficiently great slope.4 It is therefore not essential here
whether the tendency of entropy to increase is meaningful on a cosmological scale
(since the law of increasing entropy may be meaningful only for closed
systems). Regardless of the scale or scope of the applicability of the law, it
cannot be denied that structures of increasingly complex order are continually
forming.
The
study of the formation of complex, highly ordered systems is attracting
increasing attention, especially in connection with the formation of
macromolecules from which living molecules have emerged. We still know little
more about this process than
Two
possible generalized mechanisms by which structures of increasing complexity
come into being tend to suggest themselves.
Changes
of a random character, randomly induced, can lead to the appearance of
qualitatively different structures which compete for the underlying “raw
materials,” that is, underlying physical substructures in the manner of the
Darwinian process of natural selection.
In
what many suspect is a more likely process of self- development, particular
structures of higher complexity form themselves preferentially from the
available substructures.5 This may occur as a result of the tendency
of systems to undergo spontaneous transitions to lower energy levels, with the
element of irreversibility introduced by the release of the surplus energy in randomized
form (dissipation as radiation or thermal energy), making this surplus
immediately unavailable for reversal of the process. The structures that are
more likely to survive continual interactions with other structures and
substructures are those with the more favorable binding energies. The physical
world could then be regarded as being in a process of development in a
direction that is law-governed, but in which contingencies can play a
significant role and thereby determine the speed with which the law-governed
tendency is likely to emerge. Obviously, such a process of evolutionary
development is not at all easy to project into the future and is easier to
understand by hindsight. The law-governed character of the process, however,
makes it possible to characterize one or another stage in development as
progress or regress insofar as the scientific theory gives us knowledge of the
future course of development to some degree of adequacy. The term “progress”
used in this way is connected with a sense of progression that reflects a
logical and historical unity, the historical process is a consequence of
logical necessity.6
A
regressive development can be one that sidesteps or reverses the development of
the physical system, delaying the progression but not eliminating the tendency
for the system as a whole to move in the progressive direction. This would be
similar to those branches in the biological evolution of primates that led to
apes of limited intelligence in relation to the branch from which homo sapiens developed.
Another
type of regressive development is one which annihilates the system as a whole,
as in the case of some catastrophic event. Physical systems, however, are never
so thoroughly destroyed that they leave no trace of their previous existence.
Matter does not vanish but only undergoes transformation. Catastrophic
destruction thus represents a relatively greater regression, either by taking
the evolutionary process backward several stages or by removing one of several
that have the potential for developing along the same line.
In
the case of evolutionary processes one has to be cautious about attaching the appellation
progressive or regressive. The terms really have significance only to the extent
that transitions from a structure on one level to a higher level can be
embraced with significant predictability within the framework of a scientific
theory appropriate to those levels. In the dialectical-materialist view, laws are
really tendencies, and when a theory attempts to embrace levels that are too
distant from one another, the contingent aspects turn science into speculation.
The concept of progress in connection with processes of
evolutionary development in the physical world is more difficult deal with than
in the case of the social world, because, contrary to the general belief, our
scientific knowledge of process is more highly developed in the social sphere
than in the physical sphere. Marx introduced the concept of socioeconomic
formation as the fundamental social structure underlying fundamental social
change. He was then able to study the evolutionary transitions giving rise to
the succession of socioeconomic formations, all of which were accessible from
historical materials, and all of which were still to be found in the world in
his own lifetime, namely, communal, slave, feudal, and capitalist societies. In
the Marxist view, the scientific accuracy of his analysis was remarkable, not
only in regard to his success in outlining the principal tendencies that were
to manifest themselves in the course of the further development of capitalist
society, but also his recognition of the communist socioeconomic formation as
the necessary consequence of these developments in capitalism. In the case of
the physical world, we are first beginning to explore processes of galactic
formation and stellar evolution under rather difficult conditions for gathering
empirical data. Physical science has largely been concerned with investigations
of properties of states of stable structures, rather than with the transitions
among them. The present forms of matter on the physical level have not
undergone discernible change in some ten to twenty billion years—in the most
distant galaxies we still see the same fundamental structures as we do in our
own. We are only now beginning to recognize that physical matter prior to the
big bang might be of a nature quite different from what we have in the universe
as we now know it. The study of evolutionary processes in the physical world is
thus a very young field. Such studies are more advanced in the biological
sphere and still more advanced, in the Marxian view, in the social sphere. This
accounts for the fact that dialectical materialism, as a monistic philosophical
system of thought, arose on the basis of investigations largely in the social
sciences rather than in the physical sciences, where one usually considers that
scientific knowledge is more advanced
Originally
published in Bulgarian translation in Filosofska Mysl, no. 4 (1987), 82–85
NOTES
1. Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1969), I, 503.
2.
3. See A. I. Uyemov, Veshchi, svoistva
i otnosheniya (
4. Ilya Prigogene, “Time, Structure and Entropy,” in Jiri Zeman, ed., Time in
Science and Philosophy (Prague: Academia, 1971), 89–100.
5. Manfred Eigen, “Selforganization
of Matter and the Evolution of Biological Macromolecules,” Naturwissenschaften 58 (1971),
465–523.
6. Erwin. Marquit, “Stabilité
et development dans les sciences de la nature,” La Penseé, no.
213–14 (Sept.–Aug, 1980), 122–24.