In the first camp, I see dialectical materialism used as a static sort of list of qualities that govern all of reality and nature, basically creating a list of universal laws that have predictive and explanatory power in all cases, scenarios and scales, no matter the context.

It seems arbitrary if you don’t know where the list comes from and just memorize it without much thought. I would recommend reading Engels’ Dialectics of Nature as he explains in that book the reasoning behind the list.

I think Bohm actually summarizes the idea the best.

Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”

Diamat sees reality as a single, interconnected whole, where everything flows into everything else. You cannot have a “perfect” definition of an object that perfectly captures it as it exists in the real world, because nothing exists autonomously. The more detailed the definition, the more you’d have to include aspects of things around it, and then things around that, so on and so forth, and so the only way to capture something as it actually exists in the real world would be to capture all of reality simultaneously, which is obviously not practically possible.

Instead, we divide the world up into manageable chunks, into objects and abstract categories, but these objects only reflect the dominant qualities of the system that are relevant to us. They never reflect the full complexities of the system and you will always find things that conflict with the definition you are using upon deeper analysis.

Logically, the reason for this position is because it solves certain logical paradoxes, usually those dealing with identity, such as Ship of Theseus Paradox, Water-H2O paradox, or the teletransportation paradox. Aristotle believed identity was an actual physical thing, that a “tree” isn’t just a label we put on a collection of stuff, but that this collection of stuff actually acquires an additional physical property of “treeness.” Diamat rejects this position and just sees abstract categories like “tree” as a description of the dominant character of a system.

It is kind of like a trend line on a graph. It adds no new information to the pre-existing dataset, it just creates a simple representation of an aspect of the dataset that is of interest.

Engels used the term “metaphysician” in a derogatory way to refer to the kinds of people, like Aristotle, that Bohm talked about in the quote above; people who confuse the the abstract category as equivalent to the physical reality of a thing, as if a “dog” is actually an autonomous object existing out there in the world that perfectly fits the definition of a “dog” and nothing else.

Engels goes into a lot of detail in Dialectics of Nature to show how if you take any abstract object like a “dog” and analyze it very closely, you always find it to be very ambiguous upon further inspections. For example, drawing a hard-and-fast line as to the very precise boundaries of a “dog” in space, or precise boundaries when the “dog” comes into being and passes away, or precise boundaries on the evolutionary tree of what constitutes a “dog” and what does not, you quickly find that these kinds of questions are all pretty ambiguous and you can’t actually draw a hard-and-fast line at all.

This is why in Anti-Durhing Engels says definitions are “useless for science,” because the physical reality of a thing is not to be found in some sort of very precise definition that leaves no ambiguities at all, because such a thing is impossible to construct in the first place. No matter how rigorous your definition is, you will always find internal contradictions if you analyze the object more closely, things that seem to go against the dominant character that you identified.

Hard and fast lines are incompatible with the theory of evolution. Even the borderline between vertebrates and invertebrates is now no longer rigid, just as little is that between fishes and amphibians, while that between birds and reptiles dwindles more and more every day. Between Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx, only a few intermediate links are wanting, and birds’ beaks with teeth crop up in both hemispheres. “Either-or” becomes more and more inadequate.

Among lower animals, the concept of the individual cannot be established at all sharply, not only as to whether a particular animal is an individual or a colony, but also as to where in development one individual ceases and another begins (nurses).

For a stage in the outlook on nature where all differences become merged in intermediate steps, and all opposites pass into one another through intermediate links, the old metaphysical method of thought no longer suffices. Dialectics, which likewise knows no hard and fast lines, no unconditional, universally valid “either-or,” and which bridges the fixed metaphysical differences, besides “either-or,” recognises also, in the right place, “both this-and that” and reconciles the opposites. It is the sole method of thought appropriate in the highest degree to this stage.

Of course, for everyday use, for the small change of science, the metaphysical categories retain their validity.

— Engels, Dialectics of Nature

If we assume that (1) nature is a single unified whole which is impossible to capture in a definition / abstract category, and (2) we still need to use definitions / abstract categories because of our finite mental capacity, then the next question becomes, how do we navigate this? How do we operate with the knowledge that we have to use categories which we know are inherently limited (unlike the metaphysician which fails to recognize the limited nature of these categories and confuses them for reality)?

That is what dialectics is about. It is a logical framework to deal with this.

Engels, in Dialectics of Nature, reduces dialectics to three laws. The first two are the most important as they explain how qualities (abstract categories) are to be dealt with.

The “law of the interpretation of the opposites” is the idea that any concept only makes sense in reference to opposite. The concept of “inside” does not make sense unless it is being implicitly contrasted with “outside.” One of them inherently implies the existence of the other. Logically, the opposite has to exist, and, as said before, upon closer inspection of any object, you will find things which conflict with how you have defined the dominant character. Everything must logically contain these “internal contradictions.”

“The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa” then explains how these abstract categories change. If I let an apple sit long enough, it will eventually rot so much it ceases be an apple. How does this happen? It’s because there were already non-apple-like things already within the apple that just were not the dominate character, and over time, those grew while the apple-like qualities decayed, until the apple-like qualities ceased to be the dominate character.

The fact that identity contains difference within itself is expressed in every sentence, where the predicate is necessarily different from the subject; the lily is a plant, the rose is red, where, either in the subject or in the predicate, there is something that is not covered by the predicate or the subject. That from the outset identity with itself requires difference from everything else as its complement, is self-evident.

— Engels, Dialectics of Nature

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