Dialectics and Darwin
Engels reduced dialectics to three laws: the laws of the transformation of quantity into quality; the interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation. He believed these were uniformly applicable to the human and natural worlds. The impetus for this inflation of Marx's naturalism lay in the implicit belief of Engels that if dialectical laws could be verified in nature, then the validity of such laws in history would, as a consequence, have also to be admitted; the truth of dialectics in nature entailed the truth of Marx's concept of history.
Engels's doctrine apotheosized motion. Since "motion is the mode of existence of matter," only dialectics, which was "nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought," could fully elucidate matter in its various manifestations.[5] By framing laws of motion, dialectical thought progressively amassed an exact representation of the world. "The dialectics of the brain is only the reflection of the forms of motion of the real world, both of nature and of history."[6]
Marx himself had seen no need for such an external foundation to historical materialism, whether in nature or in general laws of history. In Engels's case, this generalized underpinning of materialism resulted in statements so broad as to be virtually meaningless. For example, he effusively praised dialectics for revealing "the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away. . . . And dialectical philosophy is nothing more than the reflection of this process in the thinking brain."[7] Dialectics for Engels came to approximate a cosmic theory of evolution, accounting for the whole of natural and human history. In a speech at his comrade's graveside, he praised Marx's discovery of the "law of development" governing human history, an achievement on a par
with Darwin's discovery of the law of development governing natural history.[8]
Indeed, thanks to the example of Engels, orthodox Marxism was eventually based on an evolutionary version of positivism, stressing the primacy of objective laws of development, and dismissing subjective factors as epiphenomenal. Marx had wanted to dedicate Capital to Darwin, and Engels, following this lead, eagerly sought to incorporate the latest findings of anthropology into Marxism. On more than one occasion, he compared the findings of Darwin in biology and Morgan in anthropology to those of Marx in political economy and history.[9] The attractions of a neo-Darwinian evolutionary positivism were manifold. Evolutionary positivism promised nothing less than an empiricial explanation of chance and irrationality in the social world. As Engels once remarked, Darwin's discoveries spelled the collapse of metaphysical necessity. Yet Darwin's notion of evolution reinstated a qualitatively higher notion of necessity, incorporating chance. The laws of adaptation and heredity became guiding threads in an evolutionary development eventually issuing in a rational human order.[10] In short, evolutionary positivism could be interpreted as accommodating irrational digressions while guaranteeing rational progress, all without recourse to the subjective presuppositions of Enlightenment rationalism.
The evolutionary thesis thus conveniently accounted for the empirical diversity of man, the influence of accident, and the existence of unreason, at the same time as it preserved values and upheld a teleological end of history. Evolutionary positivism avoided the pitfalls of relativism while affording the prestige of ironclad natural laws. For Engels, it rescued Hegelian dialectic from mystification and delivered it over to natural scientific treatment: "The old teleology has gone to the devil, but the certainty now stands firm that matter in its eternal cycle moves according to laws which at a definite stage—now here, now there—necessarily give rise to the thinking mind in organic beings."[11]
For Engels, precise knowledge resided in a perfect reflection of this world of evolving matter in motion. The "materialist conception of nature" comprised "nothing other than the simple concept of nature, just as it presents itself to us, without any foreign admixture [ohne fremde Zutat ]."[12] Engels founded the possibility of such a perfectly reflective concept of nature in the very notion of evolutionary
materialism. Such a materialism portrayed the universe in its totality as composed of ascending levels of organized matter. "The motion of matter is not merely crude mechanical motion, mere change of place, it is heat and light, electric and magnetic stress, chemical combination and dissociation, life and, finally, consciousness."[13] The dialectical laws framed by consciousness could then appear simply as the emergent reflection of the dialectics objectively present in all matter, from the simplest to the most complex, including consciousness itself. Properly grasped, mind was matter conscious of itself.