Letters from Tomis

Seventeenth in a series of reflections on my thoughts after reading What is Marxism: An Introduction into Marxist Theory by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. The thoughts, opinions, and any errors are mine alone.

It is a commonplace to consider the natural world with awe. To observe its staggering intricacies—its cycles of life, death, evolution, and decay—is to be overwhelmed by the sense of a vast and implacable order. But to stop at awe alone, to halt at a merely spiritual or poetic appreciation of nature, is to miss its fundamental lesson. Nature, properly understood, does not simply evoke reverence. It proves, beyond contest, that dialectics—those perpetual clashes of opposites that drive progress and change—are the very engine of reality.

As I have stated in previous reflections, dialectics are most often associated with the revolutionary philosophy of Hegel and Marx, a kind of intellectual shorthand for the way in which contradiction begets resolution, only for resolution to spark further contradiction in an endless, generative cycle. Yet before it was enshrined in the parlance of philosophy, dialectics were written in the very fabric of nature itself. Nature is not a still-life painting, nor is it the static, harmonious Eden of sentimental imagination. It is instead a ceaseless struggle of forces, a tension of opposites in perpetual flux. In observing this process, we find the profound and inexorable truth that conflict—far from being an aberration or flaw in the system—is the very means by which nature evolves and progresses.

Take, for instance, the concept of evolution by natural selection, that most brilliant and unsettling of Darwinian insights. Here, the dialectic is expressed not merely in abstraction but in biological reality. Nature, ever at war with itself, pits species against environment, predator against prey, and organism against organism. The contradictions are manifold: the fittest survive, but the survivors are shaped by the pressures that once threatened to destroy them. It is a perfect negation: the problem creates the solution, but the solution gives rise to new problems. An antelope that evolves to outrun the lion ensures that lions, in turn, will evolve to become faster. Here we find no finality, no resting place of perfection, but a continual process of development driven by opposition. Nature abhors stasis. It thrives on contradiction.

Even the basic processes of life reflect this dialectical reality. Consider the cell: a microscopic engine of contradiction, constantly balancing growth and decay, division and unity, absorption and expulsion. Metabolism itself is dialectical: anabolic processes (which build) and catabolic processes (which destroy) are in constant tension. It is only through this clash that the organism can sustain itself. Should either process dominate absolutely, life itself would cease. Nature thrives in the interstice between opposites, where the synthesis of conflict produces motion, growth, and change.

Furthermore, the physical laws of the universe bear the same mark of dialectics. Thermodynamics, which governs energy’s transformations, tells us that order is born from disorder and that stability is inevitably undermined by entropy. Matter is both a product of energy and its antagonist; every structure is born with the seeds of its own eventual dissolution. The stars, those blazing titans of the cosmos, are themselves products of contradiction—fusion creates light and energy even as it threatens to tear apart the celestial body that contains it. And when the star’s fuel is spent, when its dialectical process reaches its inevitable limit, it collapses and gives rise to something new: a supernova, a black hole, or a nebula—a violent end that is simultaneously a new beginning.

Perhaps the most compelling proof of dialectics in nature is the climate, that grand and tragic interplay of opposites. The earth’s systems exist in a precarious balance between heat and cold, carbon absorption and release, creation and destruction. Life itself emerges as an adaptive response to these contradictions: the seasons alternate, ecosystems adapt, and species adjust to ever-changing conditions. Yet we humans, in our heedless manipulation of the natural world, have exacerbated these tensions to a breaking point. The dialectic between humanity and the planet—a relationship defined by exploitation and consequence—has reached a tipping point, and nature is beginning to push back with storms, floods, and rising seas. The resolution, one way or another, will not be harmonious; it will be dialectical.

The sentimentalist recoils at such conclusions, longing instead for a world of gentle harmony and unbroken calm. But nature, in its honest and brutal wisdom, offers no such illusions. The dialectical process is not gentle; it is violent, unrelenting, and indifferent. And yet, it is through this very indifference—through the merciless clash of forces—that life arises and evolves, that systems progress, that the universe itself unfolds its mysteries. Far from being proof of design, nature is proof of motion, of contradiction, of the ceaseless interplay of opposites that drives all reality forward.

It is thus that dialectics emerge not as a theory imposed upon nature, but as a truth discerned from it. It is the bedrock upon which all existence stands. One cannot look upon the struggle of species, the clash of forces, and the cycles of creation and destruction and fail to see this inexorable process at work. Nature itself, in all its staggering beauty and brutality, is the embodiment of dialectical truth—a truth that, once understood, obliterates illusions of harmony and leaves in their place something far grander: the relentless, unfolding drama of existence itself.