Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

As the title suggests, Part 2 is largely concerned with exploring the dialectical method. Dialectics seek to uncover the truth through a discourse between two or more people holding different viewpoints. Engels begins by presenting Classical Greek dialecticians like Aristotle and Heraclitus. He also describes the dialectical method’s evolution in later work by French and English dialecticians. However, most French philosophers shaping socialist thought were far more concerned with metaphysics than dialectics. Metaphysics is a broad branch of philosophy, but for Engels’s purposes he discusses it to highlight metaphysics’ tendency to apply fixed descriptions to things and ideas in isolation, without acknowledging fluidity or the capacity for a thing to be two or more things at once.

Engels criticizes metaphysics as rigid, narrow, and overly reliant on binaries: “In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees” (55). He poses dialectics as an alternative to metaphysics: “Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending” (56).