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Dialectical materialism (sometimes abbreviated ''diamat'') is a philosophy of science and nature, based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and developed largely in Russia and the Soviet Union.〔Z. A. Jordan, ''The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism'' (London: Macmillan, 1967).〕〔Paul Thomas, ''Marxism and Scientific Socialism: From Engels to Althusser'' (London: Routledge, 2008).〕 It was inspired by dialectic and materialist philosophical traditions. The main idea of dialectical materialism lies in the concept of the evolution of the natural world and the emergence of new qualities of being at new stages of evolution. As Z. A. Jordan notes, "Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower; that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws; and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'."〔Jordan, p. 167.〕 The formulation of dialectical and historical materialism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s by Stalin and his associates (such as in Stalin's book ''Dialectical and Historical Materialism'') became the "official" interpretation of Marxism. It was codified and popularized in text books that were required reading in the Soviet Union as well as the Eastern European countries it occupied. It was exported to China as the "official" interpretation of Marxism but has since then been widely rejected in China in the Soviet formulation. A Soviet philosophical encyclopedia of the 1960s speaks of the evolution of complexity in nature as follows: "This whole series of forms (mechanical, physical, chemical, biological and social) is distributed according to complexity from lower to higher. This seriation expresses their mutual bonds in terms of structure and in terms of history. The general laws of the lower forms of the motion of matter keep their validity for all the higher forms but they are subject to the higher laws and do not have a prominent role. They change their activity because of changed circumstances. Laws can be general or specific, depending on their range of applicability. The specific laws fall under the special sciences and the general laws are the province of diamat."〔T. J. Blakeley (ed.), ''Themes in Soviet Marxist Philosophy'' (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), p. 29.〕 Each level of matter exists as a type of organization, in which the elements that make up a whole, or system, are marked by a specific type of interconnection. The dialectical laws were criticized by Leszek Kołakowski for being fundamentally flawed — some of them being "truisms with no specific Marxist content", others "philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means", yet others being just "nonsense" and there's a group of laws that are so vague and can be interpreted differently, but these interpretations fall into one of these categories either. == The term == The term ''dialectical materialism'' was coined in 1887, by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist tanner who corresponded with Marx, during and after the failed 1848 German Revolution. As a philosopher, Dietzgen had constructed the theory of dialectical materialism independently of Marx and Engels.〔Pascal Charbonnat, ''Histoire des philosophies matérialistes'', Syllepse, 2007, p. 477.〕 Casual mention of the term is also found in the biography ''Frederick Engels'', by Karl Kautsky, written in the same year. Marx himself had talked about the "materialist conception of history", which was later referred to as "historical materialism" by Engels. Engels further exposed the "materialist dialectic" — not "dialectical materialism" — in his ''Dialectics of Nature'' in 1883. Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, later introduced the term dialectical materialism to Marxist literature.〔For instance, Plekhanov, ''The development of the monist view of history'' (1895)〕 Joseph Stalin further delineated and defined dialectical and historical materialism as the world outlook of Marxism-Leninism, and as a method to study society and its history.〔as discussed in his 1938 article, Dialectical and Historical Materialism ()〕 The exact term was not used by Marx in any of his works, and controversy exists regarding the relationship between dialectics, ontology, and nature. Joseph Needham, the influential historian of science and a Christian who nonetheless was an adherent of dialectical materialism, suggested that a more appropriate term might be "dialectical organicism".〔Joseph Needham, ''Moulds of Understanding'' (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 278.〕 For scholars working on these issues from a variety of perspectives see the works of Bertell Ollman, Roger Albritton, and Roy Bhaskar. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「dialectical materialism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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