Reading a few articles and posts, and I’m still just not getting it beyond a very basic understanding of dialectics being “stuff impacts other stuff and then affects other things including the original thing”. Materialism is easier for me to get.
Can anyone recommend a good book about it that is good for non-philosophers? Something that would work as an audiobook? I love Marx and Engels and generally I would agree with first going to the original sources to tbh their language can be too arcane for me to understand a concept I struggle with this much.
Isn’t the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” a flawed way to conceive of dialectics because it implies an outcome is the combination of two opposing things? I remember seeing a better simplification being something like “abstract > negative > concrete” or something like that.
Yes yes yes to this comment. You can go backwards or stay the same but the motion still changes things
I mean it’s very simplified. After all, the “synthesis” contains the previous two terms in the third term (so the “resolved” contradiction retains the leftovers of the contradictory state).
I think that also it’s not an outcome of the things themselves, but the tension between them.
When I learned Hegel (sadly only over a month), the thing that I remember taking away is the dialectic is ultimately about motion. So the fundamental thing is the movement between the two contraries going beyond either to a new state (that can then be opposed to another state).
So rather than a kind of “back and forth” motion that goes nowhere, the dialectic continually moves to a new state (but then will continue to produce tensions that remain unresolved, even if it’s just reaction to the new state and a claim to “go back”).
But yeah agree the terms are not perfect. They also imply a kind of equal opposition that is rare in dialectics.
