historian of biology who went to the Soviet Union to conduct interviews with various scientists, including Kirill M. His short piece “Roots of Dialectical Materialism” opens with a short anecdote of Mark Adams, a U.S. Though not a Marxist himself, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr found that his own philosophical conception of biology has surprisingly much in common with the principles of dialectical materialism.
Gould was particularly impressed by Engels’s view that the human “hand is not only the organ of labor, it is also the product of labor.… As humans learned to master their material surroundings, Engels argues, other skills were added to primitive hunting - agriculture, spinning, pottery, navigation, arts and sciences, law and politics.” 3 Elsewhere, Gould asserted that all human evolution stands and falls with gene-culture coevolution and “the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution was made by Friedrich Engels in his remarkable essay of 1876.” 4 Had his remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking.” 2Ĭommenting on Engels’s 1876 essay from Dialectics of Nature entitled “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Engels provided us with a “brilliant exposé” of an advanced theory of human evolution with the role of labor at its heart. “Had Engels’ method of thinking been more familiar, the transformations of our ideas on physics which have occurred during the last thirty years would have been smoother. However, Engels’s more comprehensive Dialectics of Nature was rather recently, in the 1920s, discovered and published. Haldane wrote that Engels’s contributions to the philosophy of nature and the natural sciences are widely known from his Anti-Dühring. In his 1939 preface to the first English edition of Dialectics of Nature, biologist J. Now as then, the natural sciences are occupied with the question of “how can the world of processes and the world of trajectories ever be linked together.” Engels may have not brought his work in progress to completion, but what he left behind continues to help enrich our philosophical understanding of nature and improve our orientation to the natural sciences of our time.
When Engels was working on his Dialectics of Nature in the 1870s and ’80s, there was a visible tendency on the rise in the natural sciences that “rejected the mechanistic world view,” drawing “closer to the idea of an historical development of nature.” Engels contributed to making explicit what was already implicit in the natural sciences of his time. Ilya Prigogine, winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, wrote that the “idea of a history of nature as an integral part of materialism was asserted by Marx and, in greater detail, by Engels.” Modern developments in natural sciences have raised philosophical issues that dialectical materialists have long investigated. His most recent publication is Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).įor varied reasons and on various occasions, contemporary natural scientists and philosophers, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, have expressed their admiration for Frederick Engels, the cofounder of dialectical materialism and scientific socialism. His work on Marx’s Bonn Notebooks won the 2019 David Riazanov Prize.
Kaan Kangal is an associate professor of philosophy at Nanjing University, specializing in dialectics, hermeneutics, metaphysics, and Marx-Engels research.