Jan 30
Milan Kunc — Dialectic (oil on canvas, 1992)
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Milan Kunc — Dialectic (oil on canvas, 1992)
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Meaningful disagreement is a Jewish value.
Required to take an opposing viewpoint.
Because groupthink...is bad.
In such a conflict, what is at stake is not truth but power, and the result is that both sides suffer.
Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Will learning about dialectics help me understanding and changing the world? Sometimes I get the impression it is an harmful attachment from Hegel that more obscures than reveals, considering how everything can be explained with "That is the dialectics" or "the contradictions are sharpening!" without that actually offering something that can be used for grappling with the situation at hand. But many communists like it because it sounds scientific, because it gives a striking sounding distinction with liberals and such. What do you think?
The version of dialectic most Marxists talk about has very little to do with Hegel, and more resemblance to the ancient forms of dialectic that priests would use to act like they could understand the deepest principles of the cosmos and predict the future. Like the I Ching, which also mostly approaches dialectic as the unity of opposites and a principle of change and does not reflexively incorporate the role of human subjectivity and freedom.
I agree with what Walter Benjamin said about this kind of thinking:
It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.
The concepts of dialectic useful for critiquing capital are more complex and more characteristic of what might be called subjective dialectic, or at least analyzing society as a historical creation. For example, the transformation of something into its opposite, which is important for understanding how greater productive powers of wealth in machinery transforms into greater impoverishment and unemployment among workers. There’s a book about this aspect of dialectic in Marx’s thought called Back to Marx by Zhang Yibing, and if you’re willing to buy a book, he also has one called The Subjective Dimension of Marxist Historical Dialectics
To him who has no taste for dialectics, metaphysics can prove nothing... Therefore, those who are interested in the success of metaphysics must always encourage the opinion that a taste for dialectics is a high distinction in a man, proving the loftiness of his soul.
Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible
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'There's a thing that happens,' Avasarala said, 'when unthinkable things become thinkable. We're in a moment of chaos. Everything's up for grabs. Legitimacy itself is up for grabs. That's where we are now.'
James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games, ch. 50
hot take but i think everyone should be infighting MORE actually
okay maybe not infighting per se but i think people with similar beliefs still having disagreements and breaching the echochamber is a great thing for dialectic and society in general