On War, Peace, and Infinitesimal Calculus

Attempts to see reality as being inherently in conflict and in motion rather than at rest have a famous unsettling quality; namely, of treating conflict and motion as something at rest. This is what happened to Engels’ ‘dialectical laws’ in his Anti-Dühring—allegedly an elaboration of what he and Marx referred to as their ‘old Hegel’ and their logical reconstruction of infinitesimal calculus. I will demonstrate how the ‘old Hegel’, in fact, differs from such opinions, arguing that conflict and motion are not an opposition of objects at rest, but something contained within, or belonging to, their form. This also resolves the initial paradox.