Talk:Dialectics of Nature

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good.88.230.30.66 (talk) 01:14, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Engels's book.88.231.236.53 (talk) 20:14, 7 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Elmar Altvater on Engels[edit]

Altbater recently published a book on Dialectics of Nature. It is in German but I learned about it during a conference he held. A review of the book is available here

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2016/2397

"The basic argument in the book is that Engels’s dialectical approach to nature anticipates later ecological and environmental approaches and concerns for the ways that accelerated economic growth threatens nature. Altvater argues that Engels recognized these risks and the necessity of developing insight in and respect for the dialectical processes of nature and its interaction with man and society. Ant there are in fact passages in Dialectics of Nature that suggest this. Engels writes ‘Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries’ (179).

Perhaps it may be useful to draw on Altvater's insights to shed more light on Engel's work? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.27.88.67 (talk) 22:45, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Heraclitus taught that everything was constantly changing and that all things consisted of two opposite elements which changed into each other as night changes into day, light into darkness, life into death etc."

Minor quibble: The description of dialectics is a good start but not exactly what Heraclitus or Hegel were writing about. 'All things' do not consist of two opposite elements. There can be water, without fire and vice versa. There can be hate without love. However, there can be no 'male' without 'female', no south pole without north pole. A relation between two things that exist independently of each other but depend on each other for their existence should be distinguished from two things that do not depend on each other for their existence.

Dialectics is really premised on a view that understands reality as 1. relational and interconnected; 2. in process or motion; and 3. comprising a totality which is missed out in the definition above. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.27.88.67 (talk) 22:54, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]