To grasp the fundamental correspondence between Nowruz and dialectics, one must first discard the illusion that dialectics is merely a logical method or a historical process. Dialectics is more than the movement of thought; it is the structure of reality itself. If dialectics is the rhythm of becoming, then Nowruz is its most ancient expression—a ritualized form of the perpetual return, which is not a return to the past but to the origin, an origin that never ceases to change. This return is not a circle but a vortex, spiraling through time, in which the new contains the past, and the past emerges in the new as an unrecognizable presence. Nowruz, in its most profound essence, is not just a festival of renewal; it is the primordial dialectical movement, a thinking before thought, a philosophy before philosophy.
The very idea of Nowruz embodies the dialectical structure of reality: it is at once a return and a departure, the same and yet different, an eternal beginning that is never merely repetition. The festival marks the spring equinox, the precise moment when darkness and light stand in perfect equilibrium, only for one to inevitably surpass the other. This is the first dialectical moment: a tension of opposites. Winter, the time of stillness and death, negates itself and gives way to life; but this life does not annihilate winter—it carries winter within it. The blossoms of Nowruz do not erase the barrenness of the cold months; they are born from that barrenness. The old is not simply replaced but sublated (aufgehoben) into the new.
In this moment, the structure of dialectical motion is revealed: every end is a beginning, but not a return to an identical state. This is the illusion of linear thinking—that something is either identical to itself or different. But dialectics shows that true transformation is the moment where the past negates itself but does not disappear; instead, it is preserved in its very negation.
The Origin that Never Was, The Beginning that Always Returns
At the heart of Nowruz is the notion of the return to the beginning. But what is this beginning? Is it the first moment of creation, the dawn of time? Is it the golden age of Jamshid, the mythical king who inaugurated Nowruz? Or is it something else entirely? The key lies in understanding that this “beginning” is not a static point in the past but a perpetual origin that exists only in its repetition.
This is precisely where Nowruz reveals itself as the first dialectical idea in human thought. In its ritual, in its cosmological significance, it expresses what philosophy would later articulate: that the beginning is never simply before, that to return is not to go back, but to rediscover an origin that is always emerging. This is the meaning of the spiral movement of dialectics—it returns to a point that is not the same, yet still the point of origin.
In Hegelian terms, Nowruz is an aufhebung of time itself—a negation that preserves, a motion that abolishes the past only by carrying it forward into a new determination. The Nowruz of today is pregnant with the past and the future, but this pregnancy does not mean continuity in a linear sense. It means that every year, the Nowruz that was is reborn as something it never was before. The paradox is clear: Nowruz is always Nowruz, but it is never the same Nowruz. This is precisely the structure of dialectics, which moves through negation, but negation that is never destruction—it is a movement through contradiction that generates a higher unity.
The same logic is found in Marxist dialectics, where history does not simply repeat itself but advances through crises that appear to be repetitions. Just as feudalism did not return under capitalism, but capitalism contained feudalism in its very structure, so too does Nowruz contain all its past forms in its present moment.
Dialectical Time: From Myth to Philosophy
If dialectics reveals that time is not a straight line, but a process of self-negating and self-preserving transformations, then Nowruz is its first articulation, before philosophy had found the words to name it. Nowruz is not merely a festival; it is an event in time that makes time itself intelligible. It shows that history does not proceed mechanically, that progress is not simply accumulation, but that the new always emerges from the destruction of the old, yet carries the old within it.
This is why Nowruz, though seemingly pre-philosophical, is actually the most philosophical of ideas. Before Heraclitus spoke of the unity of opposites, before Hegel formalized the dialectic, before Marx saw history as a process of struggle and transformation, the structure of dialectical motion was already embodied in the ritual and myth of Nowruz. The pre-philosophical was already pregnant with philosophy. The festival of renewal was already the thought of becoming.
The origin is not simply before us, nor is it simply ahead. The origin is the point that emerges again and again, never identical to itself, yet always the same movement of renewal.
It is in this that Nowruz reveals itself as the hidden root of dialectics, the unspoken philosophy that has always structured thought itself. The vortex turns, and in each revolution, the beginning is found once more—not where it was, not as it was, but as it must be: always present, always different, always Nowruz.