Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

II.

In the meantime, alongside and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, the newer German philosophy had emerged and found its culmination in Hegel. Its greatest merit was the reintroduction of dialectics the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions; here, the logic of movement and contradiction as the highest form of thinking. The old Greek philosophers were all born, natural dialecticians, and the most universal mind among them, Aristotle, had already investigated the most essential forms of dialectical thought. Modern philosophy, on the other hand, although it also had brilliant representatives of dialectics (e.g., Descartes and Spinoza), had become more and more bogged down in the so-called metaphysical mode of thought, largely due to English influence. The 18th-century French philosophers were also, at least in their specifically philosophical works, almost exclusively dominated by this. Outside of philosophy proper, they were nonetheless able to deliver masterpieces of dialectics; we need only recall Rameau's Nephew by Diderot and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men by Rousseau.

We shall briefly state the essence of both methods of thought here. If we subject nature, human history, or our own intellectual activity to thoughtful contemplation, the image that first presents itself to us is an infinite entanglement of connections and interactions. Nothing remains where, how, or as it was; everything moves, changes, comes into being, and passes away. We therefore see the overall picture first, in which the details recede more or less into the background. We pay more attention to the movement, the transitions, and the connections than to what is moving, transitioning, and connecting. This original, naive, yet essentially correct view of the world is that of the ancient Greek philosophy and was first clearly expressed by Heraclitus: Everything is and is also not, for everything flows, is in constant change, in constant coming-to-be and passing-away. But this view, however correctly it captures the general character of the overall picture of phenomena, is not sufficient...