Need help with Dialectics Trumpist 01-05-24 01:39:46 No. 22025 [Reply]
I have to confess something to you, comrades. I've been a leftist for many years now (here since the 8chan days), and I still CANNOT fully understand what the fuck dialectics is. Yes, I've read plenty, I've read a lot of Marx and Engels, later Marxist authors, philosophy books, dictionary definitions, I've watched philosophy lectures, youtube videos. I've even read some Hegel, with a lot of difficulty. All this and my brain still cannot grasp wtf dialectics is actually supposed to be. The first problem is that many of these texts on dialectics look like pure gibberish to me, and it makes me mad when I can't understand them. Second, the words and definitions seem to change constantly depending on what I'm reading. Some people talk about the "dialectical method", others about "laws of dialectics", the "dialectic of history", "materialist dialectics", "dialectical biology", "dialectical consciousness", x person's dialectics, x philosophy's dialectics, others even bring up math and physics, etc. It all becomes increasingly convoluted and confusing, and in the end I fail to understand anything. It just leads me back to my initial question, what the fuck is dialectics? Maybe I'm just really not smart enough for Marxism, or philosophy is not my thing. Still, I've been thinking about giving dialectics another try, maybe starting from scratch again, so if anyone knowledgeable can point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it. Maybe there's some key treatise I've missed or some obscure lecture that will make it all easier. Thanks for reading my rant.
5 posts omitted. Anonymous 14-05-24 06:38:08 No. 22106
>>22073 >Yeah. Ever since I became enamored with Marxism I tried to translate dialectical materialism to science. I think complex system theory and some ideas in physics such as critical transition are a scientific expression of dialectical materialism, coincidentally so. Though they still harbor brainworms due to the philosophical grounding of capitalist society (e.g. mechanical materialism, idealisations) Ok then, good to know I'm going in the right direction. I get that having scientific knowledge is necessary to understand dialectics too. I've heard many times from marxist authors and soviet textbooks that dialectics has been vindicated by science. They mention dialectics in many scientific fields and in concepts like entropy, elementary particles, natural selection and so on. Karl Marx considered Darwin to be pretty important, he told Engels about Origin of the Species
>This is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views. Have you ever read Dialectics of Nature? After studying a lot of science back in his day, Engels was convinced that nature is indeed dialectical and wrote this book with Marx's backing in an attempt to prove it:
>"To me there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it." >"Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature" >That was a very interesting watch. Are you German? If not then it must be quite difficult for you to understand the content, having to learn all of that in a different language. No. I should have mentioned that the video has English subtitles. Still, many of these words that the German philosophers used like substance, thing in itself, immanent, spirit, and the infamous Sublimate/Aufheben have been VERY confusing to me. I should make sure I understand them all before trying to step into German idealism.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text. Anonymous 14-05-24 11:02:10 No. 22107
>>22106 >Have you ever read Dialectics of Nature? Yes, and I was quite disappointed by it because it wasn't what I was looking for. For most of the book, Engels meanders about scientific questions that are archaic today and when he spoke about what dialectical materialism means in scientific terms he did so relatively briefly.
>have been VERY confusing to me.Bet. The terms are more intuitively understandable when you speak German.
>Really? So you don't prefer to read in German? I thought Marx and Hegel would be way easier in the original language.I didn't explain that well. I do read them in German nowadays and also think it's easier to understand them when you read them in the original language. What I meant was that I used to read everything in English because most of the content I engage in is in English. Free English PDFs are much easier to find than German ones so I started reading German philosophers in English first.
Anonymous 22-05-24 06:13:15 No. 22146
>>22107 >For most of the book, Engels meanders about scientific questions that are archaic today and when he spoke about what dialectical materialism means in scientific terms he did so relatively briefly. Oh well. Do you know Alan Woods' works? It's the most recent work I know of that attempts to tackle science from a marxist point of view. He wrote a book called Reason in Revolt and a history of philosophy
>>22108 Thank you, I actually forgot that Hegel wrote a condensed version. I've been slowly reading it these days. I've been forced to consult a couple extra books, like a Hegel dictionary/glossary thing because some expressions are really hard to get (and don't get me started on Kant, he's even more confusing than Hegel). I've been checking out the book The Philosophy of Hegel (1955) by W.T. Stace, which was recommended to me during the 8chan days of /leftypol/, but I'm trying to not rely on it much.
Well I think something is finally starting to click. At least I'm slowly starting to get Being and Nothing, which is way more than I ever knew before. You know it's too bad that Marx couldn't write that treatise on Dialectics he had planned. Would've saved decades of arguments and debates.