Contrary to metaphysics and mechanical materialism, it was Hegel’s (1770-1831) dialectical system which developed dialectics to a higher stage. For the first time Hegel presented nature, history and intellectual field as a continuous process and it was his greatest contribution. According to Hegelian dialectics the whole world is in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change; and it also tried to discover those internal relations that can give all motions and developments the shape of a complete whole, but Hegel could not solve that problem because (i) as an individual he had his own limitations, (ii) in his era, natural science and science of society had not developed to such an extent as mentioned earlier (three discoveries), and (iii) he himself was an idealist. In his view, his ideas were not reflections of objective reality in human mind, but to the contrary even changing matter was itself the reflection of some “Absolute Idea”. Thus with this idealist concept, Hegel turned everything upside down.
Hegel presented laws of dialectics as merely ‘laws of thinking’. In this form, these laws are superimposed on nature and history (instead of discovering them in these and developing them from these). So the objective world must correspond with this system of thought (which itself is the product of the development of human thought !)
But the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy lied in the fact that it once for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all products of human thought and action. For Hegel, truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of Science which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it could proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do. This also holds good for history. A “perfect” society, a “perfect” state are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from lower to the higher. For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute and sacred.
But in Hegel, the views developed above are not so sharply delineated. They are a necessary conclusion from his method, but one which he never drew with such explicitness. And this indeed, for the simple reason that he was compelled to make a system, and, in accordance with traditional requirement, a system of philosophy must conclude with some sort of absolute truth. On this way, the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian System is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method. Thus the revolutionary side is smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side. And we find that his “Absolute Idea” is to be realised in a limited, moderate, indirect rule of the possessing classes suited to the petty-bourgeois German conditions of that time.
And while young Hegelians were busy in solving the idealism—materialism puzzle, came Feuerbach’s ‘Essence of Christianity’. With one blow it pulverised the contradiction and placed materialism on the throne again. He told that nature existed independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves product of nature, have grown up. The higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflexion of our own essence. The spell was broken. All young Hegelians became Feuerbachians.
The course of evolution of Feuerbach is that of a Hegelan into a materialist—an evolution which at a definite stage necessitates a complete rupture with the idealist system of his predecessor. Feuerbach is a pure materialist. According to him matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter. Though Hegel was an idealist and Feuerbach a materialist, both agreed on one point—both considered materialism of eighteenth century as mechanical, criticised this materialism and broke off their relations with this system.
Though three great discoveries in natural science were made during Feuerbach’s life time, he was completely ignorant of them. He never understood the importance of applying materialism in the study of society, and in this respect he remained chained in idealist shackles. So, Feuerbach refused to take the responsibility of developing materialism in accordance with new discoveries in natural science and new developments in society.
But out of the dissolution of the Hegelian school, there developed still another tendency, the only one which has borne real fruit. This tendency is represented by Marxist philosophy. The separation from Hegelian philosophy was here also the result of a return to the materialist standpoint. But here the materialistic world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and was carried through consistently—at least in its basic features — in all domains of knowledge concerned. Hegel was not simply pushed aside. On the contrary, one started out from his revolutionary side described above, from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form this method was unusable. Hence Hegelian ideological perversion was done away with. In this Marxist method, concepts are regarded as images of real things instead of of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thereby the dialectics of concept itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus dialectics of Hegel was turned upside down and placed upon its feet.
Thus arose dialectical materialist philosophy of Marx-Engels. Now we will discuss the main features of this dialectical materialism in three parts — dialectics, materialism and historical materialism.
