What Is Dialectics, Really? Part 4: The Essence of Things Is the Identity of Opposites
In Part 2, “Understanding Objective Thought”, we first met the concept of essence. We learned that the laws, regularities and objective thought contained within a thing and governing it are the thing’s essence, and that essence is the driving force of a thing’s movement and development.
In the previous part, “Understanding Opposition and Identity”, we learned that the fundamental or essential difference between a thing and another is in fact opposition: the opposition and identity of a thing and its opposite. This identity of opposites makes a thing inseparable, in its very essence, from its opposite, so that it contains its opposite within itself. That gives every thing an inborn nature of contradiction and negation. And because of this identity, the contradiction of a thing is really self-contradiction, and its negation is self-negation, the thing negating itself. Its identity with its opposite is also a self-identity, an identity of the thing with itself.
Because things have this nature, this essence, from birth, they cannot keep themselves in being. First, they always have a negation, an opposite. Speak of life and there is non-life; speak of debt and there is credit; speak of positive and there is negative; speak of matter and there is spirit. Second, they necessarily move toward their opposites, precisely because of this nature of self-contradiction and self-negation. Life moves toward non-life; a debt, on the other side, is a credit; and matter, too, turns into spirit.
So we say that the essence of a thing is its identity with its opposite, with its many opposites. A thing can have many kinds of opposites. A human being, for example, can regard other people as their opposite, and can regard nature as their opposite as well. Human essence, then, contains the opposition and identity of person and person (self and other) and of humanity and nature. It is because of this essence that people are turning toward their opposites every day: we are always influenced by others and always influencing others; and every day, too, we have to deal with nature. So it is with life and non-life: not only is every living body made of non-living matter, but its life can be sustained only through constant exchange with non-life.
Yet this turning of things into their opposites seems a very simple and uninteresting process. Life turns into non-life, non-life turns back into life. This mutual turning is indeed the most fundamental phenomenon, but it seems monotonous and dull, and it seems to have no end: things simply go on turning into each other, and there seems to be no real progress or development at all.
This intuition is entirely right. We call this simple, endless passing over or turning into the opposite a “bad infinity”. It looks like an infinite process, but its infinity is merely a number that keeps growing, a monotonous repetition with no essential rise or leap. Such an infinity is a false infinity, and it is quite natural that it leaves us dissatisfied, with an impression of something too monotonous and dull.
The closest likeness to this is the way animals exist. Animals are this monotonous turning of life into non-life and back. Animals are only born and die; that monotonous round is what they do, and apart from eating and reproducing they do almost nothing else. So the existence of animals is only a very simple “many”: each animal species has many individuals, but the relations between them are only external, and they remain distant from one another. This simple “many” is the result of the bad infinity. “Bad” here means that it is only a simple growth in number, with no essential rise; it stays within “the many”.
What does a different situation look like? It is the situation of human beings. Humanity, too, is “many”, but the relations between person and person, and between humanity and nature, have reached a higher level. Humanity has many individuals too, but the relations among them are very close: through the division of labor and cooperation they have reached a high degree of sociality. The identity of person with person and of humanity with nature, hidden in human essence, has reached a higher level; we can say that human essence has truly been realized. Looking closely at humanity, we find that everything a person needs is produced and provided by other people. Human beings do not have to go out and forage or hunt for every meal. Of course, everyone also needs to work, helping others with some product or service; and in this process of communication, cooperation and service, humanity developed language and thought, and with this great tool entered a wholly new realm: exploring nature and the universe, and coming to know itself. We can say that humanity has given the word “species” a new and higher meaning.
Animals, by contrast, are each isolated in essence. Each must forage or hunt for every meal; the safety of each individual is always in question, always on the edge of death. Some animal species do have division of labor and cooperation within them, but their cooperation stays at the level of instinct and can go no further. Taken as a whole, the relations between animal individuals are fragmented, and so is the relation between the species and its individuals: the individuals contribute nothing to the species, and the species does not protect the individuals; they keep the species in existence only by simple birth and death. In other words, they have not realized the identity, contained in their essence, among individuals and between individuals and nature; more precisely, they have not realized this identity at a higher level, have not realized their essence at a higher level. Human beings did; animals did not. That is why humans became human, while animals are still animals. If for animals the species is still something external, cut off from the individual, then humanity is the first species to have realized “the species”: a true “species-being”. We may also say that in humanity “the species” has realized itself for the first time. Here we can almost treat “species” as another name for essence.
Essence is the laws and regularities of things, the objective thought contained in them; but these laws, regularities and thoughts are, in their essence, the inner identity of a thing with all its opposites. Human beings have reached a higher identity among individuals, and so we respect each other and work together, we write beautiful poems and love letters in intimate language, and we have built social institutions that strive to be just. Human beings have also reached a higher identity with nature: the fascination with which scientists study natural phenomena, and their untiring research, is the very activity of this identity and its vivid expression. That is why humanity can see into the secrets of nature and use those secrets and that knowledge to create a brilliant civilization. Animals have not reached this higher identity. Among individuals, and between individuals and nature, they remain in a lower identity, and so they stay in the monotonous, endless cycle between birth and death; apart from eating and reproducing, they have no activity that goes deeper into one another or deeper into nature.
The essence of a thing is like a lighthouse within it. A thing is not only driven by its essence; it also takes the realization of its own higher essence as its goal, because that higher essence holds a higher and closer identity of the thing with all its opposites. When we look back at nature and at animals, we know that life was potentially present in nature: life is the higher essence of nature, and nature has succeeded in realizing life, in developing it. Animals are potentially human: the human being is the higher essence of the animal. We human beings have realized this essence. We became human, opened up a whole new world, and became the pioneers and builders of civilization. To put it briefly, a thing is potentially its essence; and “potentially” means that it has the potential but has not yet realized it. To realize a higher essence is to realize one’s potential, to reach a higher and at the same time deeper identity with one’s opposites: the other person becomes more like oneself, another “I”, rather than an unrelated passer-by; and nature becomes more a human nature, nature understood and grasped by human thought and spirit, rather than a strange and oppressive outside force.
We say that a higher essence has been realized in human beings. This essence exists in nature and in animals too; it is only in human beings that it has developed into a higher form, the form it ought to have. The process by which essence — that is, objective thought and objective reason — drives things to negate themselves again and again and to reach their own higher levels, we call dialectics. This process is driven by the thought contained in things: it is the essence within things that drives nature, animals and human beings to keep developing themselves, from a lower identity to a higher identity. Note that even the highest essence is present, in potential form, in the lowest things. It drives even the lowest things to negate themselves again and again, and to go beyond their own finitude through a very special activity, so as to realize themselves. What we are going to tell is this whole process and its principle.
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