Metaphysics
“To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses…For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.” —Friedrich Engels
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that can be traced all the way back to Aristotle. This philosophy postulates that physical objects exist statically, never moving or changing, and isolated from their surroundings. Because of this, things must always equal themselves, become “self-identical” in the Hegelian sense. This implies that these static objects lack any contradictions whatsoever, hence they never change.
Metaphysics stands in stark contrast with the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism.