Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 09 – 12
Consider the familiar transformation:
Ice ↔ liquid water ↔ water vapor
Hegel used the different phases of water as an example of the transition from quantitative to qualitative change. A gradual alteration in temperature, he observed, does not merely make water progressively warmer or colder. At particular points, one state is interrupted and another appears. Ice melts; water boils. In Hegel’s words, “the irruption of another state is a leap.”
This observation was not scientifically naïve in every respect. Hegel recognised that, during melting or boiling under specified conditions, continued energy transfer may cease to produce a gradual increase in temperature. The temperature remains approximately constant while the phase changes. He had therefore noticed a real feature of what would later be described thermodynamically as a first-order phase transition involving latent heat.
But what exactly does this example demonstrate?
It shows that gradual variation in one measurable condition can be associated with a discontinuous change in macroscopic properties. It does not by itself show that an internal contradiction has generated the transformation. Nor does it establish that the process is immanent, historically directed, or governed by a universal dialectical law.
In the familiar experiment, energy is transferred into or out of the water from its surroundings. The temperature at which the transition occurs also depends upon pressure. Change the pressure and the transition point changes. At sufficiently low pressure, liquid water cannot exist as a stable phase; near the critical point, the ordinary distinction between liquid and gas disappears.
Where, then, is the immanence?
The molecular structure of water and the forces among its molecules determine how it responds to changing conditions. These properties belong to the water. But an internally structured capacity to respond is not the same as an internal contradiction that generates its own transformation. The transition in the familiar example is induced by altered boundary conditions, while its particular form depends upon the organisation of the material system.
The example is also reversible. Ice can melt into water, water can evaporate or boil into vapour, vapour can condense, and water can freeze. The same chemical substance persists through these transformations. The phases differ genuinely in their macroscopic organisation and properties, but vapour is not the historical negation of liquid water, nor is liquid water a higher reconciliation of the contradiction between ice and vapour.
This does not mean that no qualitative change has occurred. It means that “qualitative change” is a description of the difference between states, not an explanation of the mechanism producing the transition.
The problem becomes more evident when Hegel places the phases of water beside birth and death. Birth and death are ordinarily irreversible at the level of the organism, whereas transitions among the phases of water may be reversed by changing temperature and pressure. These processes differ in mechanism, temporal direction, organisation, and reversibility. Calling all of them transitions from quantity to quality groups them together at precisely the point where scientific investigation must distinguish among them.
Yet Hegel may not have been speaking only about babies being born or organisms dying. Within his idealism, birth and death can be understood more generally as determinations through which thought apprehends the appearance and disappearance of phenomena. Whatever acquires a determinate existence may be described as being born; whatever ceases to exist in that form may be described as dying.
In this sense, Hegel may have identified something important about the organisation of experience. We do not encounter reality as an undifferentiated continuum. We distinguish things, processes, phases, beginnings, endings, and thresholds. When a process crosses a boundary beyond which we recognise another determinate form, we may describe the new form as having been born and the preceding form as having died.
But a movement in conceptual determination is not necessarily the mechanism generating the material event.
Within Hegel’s own idealism, the transition from thought to being was supported by the architecture of his system. Thought and reality were not ultimately independent domains. The categories through which thought developed were also presented as the intelligible structures of reality. Contradiction, negation, becoming, birth, death, and the transition between quantity and quality could therefore function simultaneously as movements of thought and movements of being.
One may reject this idealism, but the position has an internal logic.
The problem changes fundamentally when the idealist foundation is removed.
Feuerbach turned philosophical attention away from Spirit and towards material and human existence. Marx attempted a more extensive materialist reversal. He famously stated that Hegel’s dialectic was standing on its head and had to be turned right side up. Material production and social relations would replace the self-development of the Idea as the principal field of historical movement.
But could the dialectic retain its generative force after its idealist foundation had been removed?
If material reality exists independently of thought, the categories through which thought organises experience cannot automatically be treated as forces operating within matter. Contradiction within a conceptual account does not demonstrate contradiction within the phenomenon described. A transition between our categories does not establish that the material process was generated by determinate negation. A visible discontinuity does not prove an ontological rupture.
The materialist reversal therefore required more than transferring Hegelian terminology from Spirit to nature, production, and society. It required independent empirical evidence that the transferred categories corresponded to real causal mechanisms.
Marx’s acceptance can be located in a specific argument rather than inferred from his general admiration for Hegel. In Chapter 11 of Capital, Volume I, he discussed the minimum capital needed for an owner to live from the surplus labour of others and function fully as a capitalist. He then invoked Hegel’s quantity and quality law as confirmed by that transition. But Marx’s own explanation depended on labour costs, surplus labour, the owner’s requirements, and the technical conditions of production. Those conditions did explanatory work. The Hegelian formula did not establish them. Its presence in the passage demonstrates Marx’s endorsement of the principle, but not that his entire economic explanation depended upon it.
Engels made the wider claim. In Dialectics of Nature he presented the three laws as general laws abstracted from nature and human history, while crediting Hegel with their formulation. We should therefore examine his claimed empirical abstraction rather than say that he simply copied an idealist system without argument. The difficulty is that examples of different transformations do not establish that one causal law governs them. What is common to water changing phase and a wire becoming visibly luminous may be only the general description that a measurable alteration accompanies a recognisable difference.
Engels also recognised more of the relevant physical circumstances than a simple charge of oversight suggests. His account admitted energy communicated to a body and different molecular groupings; his examples acknowledged pressure. These recognitions matter. The criticism is that acknowledging them does not establish the further connection to contradiction. An allowance for external energy may make the quantity and quality formula easier to defend while leaving a stricter claim of immanent development unsupported. We must ask which claim the example supports, rather than combine the weaker and stronger claims whenever convenient.
System boundaries make this problem especially clear. Heat transferred from a heater is external to the water if the water is our system. Include the heater, power supply, and surrounding apparatus, and some of those exchanges become internal to the enlarged system. That relabelling does not turn energy transfer into a contradiction. A defender must identify the purported contradiction within the chosen system and show that it explains the outcome. Otherwise, enlarging the system merely changes the bookkeeping while preserving the same unexamined inference.
The resulting criticism of Marx and Engels should concern their argumentative warrant, not their willingness as a presumed psychological fact. Marx expressly endorsed Hegel’s principle in the economic passage; Engels claimed a universal material scope. In these arguments they granted the formula more evidential significance than the examples justify. This does not mean that all of Marx’s economic analysis falls with the formula, or that Engels supplied no physical reasoning. It means that neither an endorsement nor a collection of illustrations bridges the gap between describing diverse changes and demonstrating their common dialectical cause.
The cardinal mistake was not that Marx and Engels noticed thresholds, opposing forces, conflicts, feedback, or qualitative transformations. Such phenomena exist. The mistake was to assume that their description in dialectical language demonstrated the operation of a common dialectical mechanism.
Water changes phase through thermodynamic and statistical processes. Organisms develop and die through biological processes. Societies change through combinations of conflict, cooperation, technological innovation, institutional learning, demographic transformation, ecological pressure, external intervention, and innumerable other processes. Similar words applied to these transformations do not make their mechanisms identical.
Once Hegelian idealism was abandoned, the connection between conceptual movement and material movement had to be established separately in every case. Instead, the ontological force of Hegelian dialectic was retained while the idealist premises that had made that force intelligible were discarded.
This was the cardinal mistake in combining Hegelian dialectic with materialism.
Dialectical language may still have heuristic or descriptive value. It may draw attention to opposition, instability, thresholds, unintended consequences, or relationships in motion. But it cannot substitute for identifying mechanisms, specifying system boundaries, distinguishing internal from external causes, and testing alternative explanations.
The phases of water provide a useful warning. Hegel correctly observed a striking threshold-dependent transformation. What he did not demonstrate was that an internal contradiction generated it. Marx accepted the supposed law and transferred it into political economy. Engels extended it into nature.
The resulting tradition too often treated the capacity to redescribe a transformation dialectically as evidence that the transformation had been explained.
It had not.
Hossein Jorjani 