Engels on the Dialectical Ontology of Nature: Climate and the “Heavy Atlantic Rain Clouds” of Ireland

ABSTRACT The premise of this article is based on an assertion that Engels made in which he stated that “nature works dialectically.” In exploring this extraordinary proposal, it is illuminating to examine Engels’s own in-depth analysis of unfinished chapter he wrote on the “natural conditions” of Ireland. Within, we observe that concrete organic reality is not a solid thing-like entity but a complex matrix of interconnecting processes that form an organic totality. The organic processes of nature, according to Engels and Marx, are dominated by the climatic process, that “life-awakening force” of soil fertility. However, what determines the form of the local weather system (the local manifestation of the climatic process) is how that system interconnects with the other organic processes of nature—geological structures, vegetation and the soil processes. Subsequently, they all form internal moments of that overall climatic process. The existence of a dialectical reality has profound implications for how we can conceptualise that reality and even more critically how we physically relate to and engage with that dialectical reality, especially when we cultivate those fluid and interconnected forces in agricultural production.