Dialectics of Nature: Engels on Dialectical Materialism as a Worldview

Revolutionary Left Radio

Breht O'Shea

Communism, Politics, Liberalism, Society & Culture, Philosophy, News, History, Leftwing, Socialism, Marxism

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 155 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Alyson and Breht explore Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a bold and underappreciated attempt to apply dialectical materialism to the natural sciences. Often dismissed or misunderstood, this unfinished work offers a sweeping view of reality - from physics and chemistry to evolution, human consciousness, and ecological breakdown - through the lens of Marxist philosophy. Together, they unpack Engels’ central claim that nature itself unfolds dialectically: through contradiction, motion, transformation, and interconnection.

They cover the three laws of dialectics, Engels’ materialist account of human evolution, his critique of mechanistic science, vulgar materialism, and metaphysical thinking, as well as his early warnings about capitalism’s ecological consequences. Along the way, they connect these insights to Marx’s concept of species-being, and reflect on what this revolutionary worldview offers in the age of climate crisis, hyper-alienation, and late capitalist decay. Finally, Alyson and Breht have a fascinating open-ended discussion about the existential and spiritual implications of dialectical materialism as a worldview.

Whether you're new to dialectical materialism or looking to deepen your understanding, this conversation reframes Engels’ work as a profound contribution not just to Marxism, but to the philosophy of science itself.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Brad Minnis. My name is Allison. I am as always here with my co-host, Brett, and we have what kind of feels like a throwback for us, actually, in the sense where we are taking a text and really breaking this thing down in a very intensive way. And I'm super excited for this. The text we will be looking at for this episode
0:38.9	is Friedrich Engels Dialectics of Nature, which is real doozy of a text, honestly. It is a pretty
0:46.4	overwhelming text to work with, so I think, you know, I'm really hopeful that we can take some
0:51.1	time and draw out the lessons from this. This is an interesting text because
0:55.5	it was also unfinished and incomplete at the time of Engle's death. It kind of in some sections
1:02.6	is sort of notes and other sections, it's full chapters. And so there's a lot of work to kind
1:07.0	to draw the core points that are being made in it. But I think we've done a pretty good job here, and I'm very excited for us to get into it.
1:13.5	And I'm just hoping that it will be useful for you all.
1:15.9	And we'll definitely talk about how what at times might feel very abstract here is we think really quite useful.
1:22.8	Definitely.
1:23.4	And Allison and I have been going back and forth. And actually, I think working for a sustained period of time, we had some rescheduling events that allowed us even more time to dive into the text. And as Allison said, kind of do our old school throwback scripted explanation of the text. But instead of doing, as we have in the past, a sort of chapter by chapter breakdown, we just instead focused on the
1:45.0	core concepts that we want to extract and explain. I think that's better because one of the things
1:50.6	about a text like this written in the late 1800s is that the cutting edge science of the time
1:55.2	that Angles is drawing on has been updated. It's in some cases outdated. The basic ideas still hold true, of course.
2:03.6	But if we were to get lost in that minutia, I think the overall episode would suffer.
2:08.3	So we're going to bypass a lot of that, pull out some core concepts and highlight that.
2:13.6	And I think by the end of this episode, the goal is that listeners will have an even
2:18.7	deeper understanding of dialectical materialism, how it arose historically, what it means,
2:25.1	and have some basis of wrestling with the idea of whether or not dialectical materialism
2:31.6	cannot just be a political tool, but can be an overall worldview.
2:36.0	It's sort of my belief, and we'll get into this in the final section when Allison and I have a
2:40.7	more organic discussion around some of the debates, that I think it is a worldview.
	...

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