he dialectical approach consists in doing thisits "laws" are the laws for doing it. As Lenin observed, the essence of dialectics is "the concrete analysis of concrete conditions".
This makes the word "dialectics" a many‑purpose oneas it is, indeed, in common use. Thus one may speak of "dialectics" in general, as the universal method of procedure of right thinking, and also of "the dialectics" of any topic one chooses to mention. One can speak of "the dialectics" of the thought‑process in general, as management of information, and also of "the dialectics" inherent in the subject matter of thought. But there emerges as of the very greatest interest and importance the investigation of the most universal modes of abstraction and assembly which are variously exemplified and applied in dealing with any subject matter on which information may be abstracted and assembled.
Hegel has the credit of being the first to open up this department of investigation, in his Science of Logic. True, he obfuscated the whole issue by working with a merely mystical conception of category. But as Marx said of him (in the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital): "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell." If only linguistic philosophers could so far overcome their prejudices as to ignore the mystifying misuses of language in Hegel, they might be able to extract the "rational kernel" for themselves, and break out of their own shell. As Engels remarked in the Dialectics of Nature: "If we turn the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday."
To this department of investigation belongs, for example, the investigation of the rules of qualitative and quantitative determination and their connectionthe so‑called "law of the transformation of quantity into quality". What is subject to qualitative determination is subject to quantitative determination, and vice versa; and these are so connected that alteration of the one is not independent of alteration of the other. Again, there belongs too the investigation of the so‑called "unity and interpenetration of opposites" and of "dialectical contradiction". To describe processes, motions and operations always involves the deployment of polar oppositions, such as "attraction and repulsion", "increase and decrease", "growth and decay", "addition and subtraction", "forwards and backwards", and so on.
But investigation of universal laws of dialectics remains an open field. It is something that has been projected but not yet systematically done. And the laws that have been written down, following Hegel, still lack both the precision of formulation and the systematic derivation to be expected of anything that can rank as science. The laws of dialectics should be, as Engels claimed, "as simple and clear as noonday". If they are not, and if their interconnection is not evident, that is because not enough work has been done on their formulation. (A case in point is the so‑called "law of the negation of negation".)
This may perhaps be thought a great failing. But to work out reliable theory it is not necessary first to work out all the principles which reliable theory exemplifies. On the contrary, no more than you have to work out all the laws of locomotion before you can walk do you have to work out all the laws of thought before you can think. It has been reported that Marx was always meaning to write a systematic treatise on logic and dialectics. But he never did. And even if he had tried, he might not have succeeded. For such an enterprise calls for a lot of highly specialised work, and most of this was done afterwards, and some of it by linguistic philosophers. To deal with dialectics requires a gro