Victory Position posted:

drunk, dumb, but do you hate OP

V. Illych L. posted:

the dialectic is when you're stupid so you gently caress up and take the entirely wrong lessons from it, leaving you stupid so you gently caress up,...

R. Guyovich posted:

more accurate to have no end and an endless chain of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. teleology is so 18th century

R. Guyovich posted:

god bless

splifyphus posted:

thesis-antithesis-synthesis is a watered down abstract simplification that really doesn't help.

dialectics goes back to the Greeks, but in its 19 and 20c developments, it's basically a kind of systems theory. instead of looking at separate objects in an abstract spacial grid you're looking at interconnected processes, matrices of relations, feedback loops and whatnot.

Kant declared all knowledge claims were grounded in subjective abstractions like 'space' and 'time'. unempirical, but necessary for our experiences to be at all intelligible. he called this matrix of a priori concepts the 'transcendental subject'. for Kant, this relativizes all claims to objective knowledge, and comfortably leaves room for religious faith.

Hegel is responding to Kant and basically has 2 books - the science of logic and the phenomenology of Spirit. the SOL tries to demonstrate how it's possible to build a transcendental subject that isn't built on a priori axioms. he does this by trying to make a massive web of concepts that generates itself - rather than being built off simple definitions and propositions, the whole matrix of concepts is a circle that loops back on itself and grounds itself in itself. weeeeee! for hegel, our subjective experience itself could be objective, as long as our concepts were dynamic, open-ended, systematic, and fukken, dialectical breh. this made a lot of people really buttmad and has been widely considered A Bad Idea.

the POS is sort of like a history of everything that had to happen in order for this matrix of concepts to generate itself, told from the perspective of the completed system and simultaneously from the perspective of joe schmoe the average naive realist who thinks his perspective is direct and unmediated, while he grows into a hegel. if that sounds practically impossible to read, you're probably right. everything else hegel wrote is basically him throwing everything he encountered into the event horizon of his concept matrix and reporting the results. he lived before television, remember.

marx read all this poo poo and used it to do social and economic historical analysis. lenin read all this poo poo and used it to burn down tsarist Russia. stalin didn't read all this poo poo, decided it was all way too complicated and melted it down into dumbfuck axioms so he could ignore it and play God. mao fused this poo poo with weird taoism and waged a multiple decade guerilla war across Asia with it. turns out if you think history is intelligible you're going to need a theory of conflict, let's call it Contradiction, and if you're hyper-focused on conflict well... Anyways it all fell apart and everybody died and then you read this post.

there are plenty of systemic theories now that do not draw explicitly on hegelian dialectics - ecology, for instance, understands its object of investigation as a dynamic, chaotic matrix of energy flows. neuroscience likewise encounters the brain as an impossibly vast network of neurons. punctuated equilibrium theory in evolutionary biology actually does draw on hegel. pretty much every basic science has its own pet systems theory now - what is still so unique about the big H and his rather messy legacy is that the dude didn't just try to develop a systemic theory of all of human history, he turned his own mind into an active experiment in said history and wanted you to know you can too.

uncop posted:

Due to its messy origins and fringe position in society, dialectics seems way more complicated than it is. Notice how straightforward something like newtonian laws of motion are to grasp for us, since they start from given and static(ally moving) objects and explain how external forces work to alter their pattern of movement. The dialectical outlook turns that whole perspective on its head: its analytical starting point is a mess of chaotic transformation and movement and it attempts to explain how reality has these patterns that allow us to imagine given, static objects in the first place: what forces there are internal to these objects that keep them together and determine how they'd dissolve into something else altogether under different conditions. Under this kind of thought-framework, e.g. gravity isn't an external force that the Earth affects on terrestrial objects, instead the Earth and terrestrial objects form a higher-level system to which gravity is internal and explains why they don't just float apart from each other and form something else altogether. And the same questions have to be answered for those terrestrial objects, the atoms they are composed of and so on, why don't they just dissolve into some primordial mist, why do they combine, separate and recombine in only specific ways in specific conditions.

Dialectical thought is just foreign to common, at least western, intuition so that it's hard to explain and grasp. On the other hand e.g. Mao afaik had read considerably less about dialectics than Stalin by the time he started writing about it (lack of Chinese translations and living in literal caves for long periods), he just had a massively easier time intuitively grasping it than European communists did, probably in part because he came from a different philosophical tradition where European philosophy was something new and external. What Marx seems to have ended up doing was to apply Hegel to explain the relation of dialectical thought, which had been developed in all high cultures, to natural reality, and that enabled people like Mao to intuitively fill the gaps in their knowledge and build a materialist dialectics without going through Hegel first. And people in general have a massively easier time grasping Mao than Hegel, maoists are honing their methods to bring dialectics to barely literate peasants and slum dwellers as we speak.

Richard Levins has a good short essay called "Dialectics and Systems Theory" about how systems theory helps bring dialectics into the realm of serious testable science while dialectics gives a general method for finding likely qualitative aspects that would explain most of the movement of the system, which is a problem one needs to solve before they can build a quantitative model to test.

Grevling posted: