Even Heraclitus said that everything in the world determines the law of the struggle of opposites. Any phenomenon or process testifies to this. Acting simultaneously, opposites create a certain state of tension. It determines what is called the inner harmony of a thing.
The Greek philosopher explains this thesis with the example of the bow. The bowstring pulls together the ends of this weapon, preventing them from dispersing. Thus, mutual tension generates the highest integrity. This is how the law of unity and opposition is realized. He, according to Heraclitus, is universal, constitutes the core of true justice and is a condition for the existence of an ordered Cosmos.
The philosophy of dialectics believes that the law of unity and struggle of opposites is fundamentalbasis of reality. That is, all objects, things and phenomena have some contradictions within themselves. These may be trends, some forces that are fighting among themselves and interacting at the same time. Dialectical philosophy proposes to clarify this principle by considering the categories that specify it. First of all, it is identity, that is, the equality of a thing or phenomenon to itself.
There are two varieties of this category. The first is the identity of one object, and the second is the identity of their whole group. The law of unity and struggle of opposites is manifested here in the fact that objects are a symbiosis of equality and difference. They interact, giving rise to movement. In any particular phenomenon, identity and difference are opposites that cause each other. Hegel defined this philosophically, calling their interaction a contradiction.
Our ideas about the source of development themselves come from the recognition that everything that exists is not integrity. It has self-contradiction. The law of unity and struggle of opposites is thus manifested as such an interaction. Thus, the dialectical philosophy of Hegel sees the source of movement and development in thinking, and the materialistic followers of the German theorist found it also in nature, and, of course, in society. Quite often, two definitions can be found in the literature on this topic. This is the "driving force" and "source of development." They are usually distinguished from each other. If we're talking about immediateinternal contradictions, they are called the source of development. If we are talking about external, secondary causes, then we mean driving forces.
The law of the unity and struggle of opposites also reflects the instability of the existing balance. Everything that exists changes and undergoes various processes. In the course of this development, it acquires a special specificity. Therefore, contradictions are also unstable. In philosophical literature, it is customary to distinguish four main forms of them. Identity-difference as a kind of embryonic form of any contradiction. Then it's time for change. Then the difference begins to take shape as something more expressive. Then it turns into a significant modification. And, finally, it becomes the opposite of what the process began with - non-identity. From the point of view of dialectical philosophy, such forms of contradictions are characteristic of any development process.
