/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>every point on the line between "the world is round" and "the world is flat" is just as absurd and stupid as "the world is flat".
Great quote anon

>>2825079
Sorry buddy but you are gonna have to step up your conceptual game because that shit you talking about ain't dialectics


>there can never be any convenient model or algorithm or formula for identifying the the truth of matter without the application of thought. there are no substitutes for thought

This is PRECISELY what Hegel says about the formalism, which is entirely u dialectical. For example, the good old thesis-antithesis-synthesis is just a stupid formalism. Marx also knew this, he understood Hegel very well. Nevermind that Stalin and Mao didn't, and now dialectics is some sort of pre-socratic universal force or something.

Dialectics has much more to do with the fact that, to form the real concept of the chair you must step outside it's definition and lead your mind towards 'abstract' things such as the mode of production.

Sadly, in order to fully understand it, you must at least understand Kant first, and to understand Kant, you must fist understand what makes him conceptually revolutionary, so you need some background. I estimate that you can do it in one to three years if you apply yourself. I'm still grappling with it myself but it has been a long time since I got to study philosophy, hence why I dont deliver to you a more satisfying exposition, which would also consume too much time.

>>2825086 (me)
Which is entirely undialectical*

Also, when it comes to the algorithm thing you are talking about, that would be more of a Leibnizian concept. Nothing to do with Hegel. He precisely each concept must be concretely and systematically determined. You are very far from track my man, I would put so much trust on your opinions when you know nothing about this shit

>>2825091 (me)
Wouldn't*

>>2825081
literal retard shit. The world was round because they walked 'flat' across the earth from Syene to Alexandria measuring how far they went. It's almost like you guys don't actually know how data collection to produce scientific laws works, or even what a scientific law is…

>>2825079
>dialectics is when thesis antithesis synthesis
not this thread again

>>2825095

it doesn't matter how dialectics works, what the mechanics of the formula are. there is no formula and there can be no formula for arriving at the truth of a matter in human discourse. truth is not a relative concept, it's not a reconciliation, it is just the truth, it is absolute and exists independently of human thought. absolute truth is a real thing, not just in things like science and mathematics, but in the social sciences as well.

people like to treat human-centric issues like politics and morality as something separate from things like science and mathematics, this special circumstance where both sides can be simultaneously right and wrong and there can be no absolute truth to anything. don't you think that's an astounding coincidence that the kinds of questions that humans have the strongest emotional stake in the answer to happen to be the very kinds of questions that we have arbitrarily determined to be impossible to answer?

anything that pisses us off or scares us or confuses us too much is placed outside the realm of "hard science" and is relegated to a separate category we call "philosophy" or "the humanities" and there are no absolute truths there, there are always two sides to everything and nobody can prove anything with undeniable fundamental logic. until they do. and then we get really pissed off and really scared and we throw tantrums and retreat into denialism and desperately try to ignore the truth until reality drags us to it kicking and screaming and then there is acceptance and then the "philosophy" becomes science.

also the entire concept of dialectics hinges on the same teleology that pervades all of marxist thought, and most western thought for that matter. an argument doesn't have any purpose, it's just something that sometimes happens between two people with conflicting views. evolution doesn't have a purpose, it's just a bunch of changes occurring over a period of time. the evolution of society is not a progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism etc. it's just a bunch of changes in social structure with no direction or end.

>>2825175
>truth is not a relative concept, it's not a reconciliation, it is just the truth, it is absolute and exists independently of human thought.
maybe material reality exists independent of human thought, but truth only exists in human thought, because it is an ideal. only if you define truth as material reality, does truth become real, but when truth becomes redefined as material reality, its usefulness as a concept withers away. may as well just discard truth and deal exclusively with material reality. but dealing with material reality requires eternal vigilance, measurement, calculation, calibration, investigation. it is costly. computation is the act of apprehending material reality, and it can only be done approximately, because computation only builds an approximate simulation of the thing itself. it can never be the thing itself. so you are right back at square one. we have a material reality, which exists, but all attempts to apprehend it are imperfect. not equally imperfect, but there is a limit. one cannot even know, for example, the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.

>>2825199
>one cannot even know, for example, the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.

and the reason one cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle is because of something called the planck constant, which is a fundamental property of reality, i.e. an absolute truth, which we can know.

uyghur

>>2825079
>everything i dont like is religion
>dialectics is mixing opposite positions
yeah no, go read some books

>>2825621
>yeah no, go read some books

it's not enough to just read some books. you have to question what you read, think critically about what you read, not just mindlessly consume it thinking that it will make you smart. your brain isn't just an empty bucket that you are supposed to fill with ideas from the books of so-called Great Men. and the so-called Great Men who wrote the books were not prophets and their books are not a divine inspiration, they came out of their own mortal fallible human brains that had all the same faculties that your brain does.

books don't contain any answers, they only contain hints. even a reference book such as an english dictionary doesn't contain any answers, it doesn't contain the meanings of any words; it just contains hints, other words intended to guide your brain towards the meaning of the words. that's all language really is, a bunch of auditory or textual concrete hints called "words" that our brains rewire themselves to associate with abstract thoughts and ideas and then use for thought and communication. you could say that the meaning lies between the words, it's what your brain latches onto while hearing/reading the words, but it's not contained in the words themselves, language is not a perfect medium for encoding and transmitting intellectual content, it is a vague and poorly-understood biological process that is lossy and indeterminate and open to interpretation. there can be no such thing as an "authoritative text" of any kind.

i've read books by marx and engels and given them a lot of thought and ultimately decided that while i may share many of their obvious underlying moral sentiments that favor a more compassionate and equitable way of living for humanity (which they unconvincingly deny as being moral sentiments), i think that their theories amount to little more than a clumsy attempt to take so-called "social science" and dress it up as so-called "hard science" to give their theories more validity when presented to their peers in the 19th century intellectual community, which was composed entirely of affluent white european men with very little concern or empathy for the struggles of the social underclass, and the way they did this was through teleology, which is really just another more acceptable kind of appeal to human emotion.

teleology was even more pervasive in 19th century western thought and language than it is today and the industrial revolution in particular was a boon for teleology because you had all these major scientific and technological breakthroughs that were revolutionizing human civilization and even the most sober-minded skeptics of the era were not immune to the very strong emotions that these developments tend to evoke in people. if anything, scientifically-minded people are even more susceptible to it and it's something that they have to internally struggle with every day in their work - just as the scientist conducting an experiment feels a very strong temptation to believe that his hypothesis is correct and his experiment will be a success, there is a very strong temptation to believe that these new developments in the world mark some sort of turning point for humanity and that things are going to continue getting better and better, that this sudden flurry of technological breakthroughs is indicative of a linear progression towards some higher goal. marx and engels very much shared these sentiments, virtually everyone did at the time, many still do to this day. but ultimately, the belief that human society is a progression towards a higher goal is an emotionally-driven perspective based on feelings of hope and excitement and pride, it's just as emotional and "unscientific" as morality is.

marx and engels did have some ideas that could be considered revolutionary, namely their outright rejection of the Great Man theory, a feat that not many famous western thinkers have been able to accomplish, though they were not the first to do so. but Great Man theory, anthropocentrism, teleology, theism, all of these things are expressions of the same vanity-driven assumption, the assumption that the universe is anything other than utterly indifferent to the psychology of human beings. there is this very strong urge to project our human dreams and our human ambitions and our human sense of purpose onto the primal forces of nature which we assume are somehow separate from us in some way, and this current runs throughout all of western thought going all the way back to the greeks, all the way back to the ancient civilizations of mesopotamia who believed in anthropocentric gods and teleological cosmogony. western thought has never been able to fully shed these vain assumptions, not even the most brilliant scientific minds of the modern era, not even people like marx and engels who ridiculed teleological thinking in others yet were completely unable to recognize it in themselves.

OP is wrong because he treats dialectics as a mystical shortcut to truth, when Marxist dialectics is actually a method for analyzing real contradictions in material reality. He attacks a caricature instead of the thing itself.

The core misunderstanding is here:

> “dialectics is mixing opposite positions”

That is not Marxist dialectics. Dialectics does not mean “every side is partly right,” nor does it mean compromise, relativism, or “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” as a formula. Even people in the thread correctly point this out.

Marxist dialectics starts from the observation that reality contains internal contradictions:

capitalism produces immense wealth and immiseration,

labor and capital depend on each other and oppose each other,

productive forces develop within social relations that eventually constrain them.

These are not mental tricks or religious reconciliations. They are objective social processes.

OP says truth is absolute and dialectics denies this. But Marxist dialectics does not deny objective reality. In fact, Marxism is explicitly materialist: reality exists independently of consciousness. What dialectics argues is that reality is dynamic, interconnected, and historically developing, so static categories fail to grasp it fully.

For example, a worker under capitalism is both:

formally “free” (not legally owned),

and materially constrained (must sell labor-power to survive).

That is not relativism. It is a concrete contradiction built into capitalist social relations.

OP also confuses dialectics with teleology. Marx did not claim history unfolds toward communism because of cosmic destiny. Historical materialism argues that social systems generate contradictions that can produce transformation. Outcomes are contingent on struggle, institutions, crises, class organization, and historical conditions — not fate.

The strongest point against OP is that he unknowingly uses dialectical reasoning himself. When he argues that scientific truth emerges through conflict between hypothesis and reality, error and correction, theory and evidence, he is already describing a dialectical process. Science advances not by static certainty, but by contradictions forcing revision and development.

Dialectics is not a substitute for thought. It is an attempt to think concretely about processes, change, contradiction, and totality instead of treating concepts as frozen abstractions.

Midwit alert!!!

>>2825842
>Marxist dialectics starts from the observation that reality contains internal contradictions

which is already dumb, right out of the gate. there are no contradictions in reality. this is typical western conceptual projection, always operating in a dualistic framework and assuming that every kind of interdependent relationship is a duality of contradictions, opposing forces that are "eternally at war" with one another in some fashion.

if you really want to expand your intelligence and think outside the box and gain some perspective and become truly aware of the limitations of the imperialist/capitalist western european framework that you operate in, you really should study eastern philosophy, read lao tzu.

>>2825980
> there are no contradictions in reality
physics tell us time "began" at some point, but physics also tells us that there was no moment "before" time. so right from the beginning there is contradiction.

>>2825980

>this is typical western conceptual projection

Dialectical thinking appears in various Eastern philosophies

>always operating in a dualistic framework

Contradictions can involve multiple tendencies pulling in all directions. This depends on the concrete situation we are analyzing.

>opposing forces that are "eternally at war" with one another in some fashion.

Not eternally obviously. Come on now, you think Marxists believe in eternal social forces?

>there are no contradictions in reality

Strange assertion for someone who claims to be Taoist

<In Taoist thought, especially in the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi, reality is often understood through complementary opposites:

<being / non-being
<soft / hard
<action / non-action
<life / death
<yin / yang

<The idea is not that one side defeats the other, but that each depends on and transforms into the other. A famous passage from the Tao Te Ching says:

<“Being and non-being produce each other.”

<That is dialectical in the sense that opposites are relational and dynamic rather than fixed.

Once you eliminate your strawman idea of dialectics, you can begin to find dialectical thinking in all world philosophies.

>>2826059

you're just interpreting any kind of complimentary pair as marxist dialectics, projecting marxist dialectics onto everything in the world, even to the point of projecting it into an ancient chinese philosophy from thousands of years ago. this kind of projection is standard behavior for every kind of brainwashed religious zealot, it's just like when christians attribute every phenomenon they encounter to the will of god.

>>2825079
Name one major discovery that was determined thru dialectics and not formal logic

>>2826427

dialectics

>>2826380
If something is true, then of course its possible to find people across time and space that have similar thoughts. Do you think people only started making accurate or semi-accurate statements from the 19th century onwards? Nice strawman about Christianity btw

>>2825079
>50% truth combined with 50% untruth equals 100% annihilation of reality.
first off, that isn't what dialectics is, but even if it were there's an interesting element you're ignoring: society has ingrained prejudices that are so powerfully reinforced through culture, military, economics, etc. that it is hard to break them down simply by repeating the truth and refuting the foundational myths. often a person who tells the truth directly is censored or killed, so a more indirect approach is needed. usually the existing system has defense mechanisms and needs to be proven wrong through its own vulnerabilities to crises, its own collapse from its own contradictions, etc. rather than by brave truth tellers. to the extent that a person or even a group alone can wield ideas against the existing system, it is usually by attacking the weakest points of the system. if you attack the entire thing you are treated as a heretic and defeated before you can really care out your task. what i mean is this. imagine time traveling to ancient rome. you want to make the case for empiricism and evidence and experimentation to them, rather than fear of the gods and belief in the need for animal sacrifice and rituals. well if you attack their religion and civic virtues you will just be treated as a dissident who deserves to be crucified and tortured. but if you say some kind of 50% truth 50% untruth like "we need to appease the gods and exhibit our republican virtues, but in secular matters evidence shall always reign supreme" then you can plant a seed of truth in society within the soil of the dominant lies, and ingrain them with a growing respect for evidence and all your other modern ideas without attacking their foundational spooks. make sense? so apply that to today. that kind of approach to truth erodes the prejudices of existing society more quickly than just moving full speed ahead. because it can save the people who give a shit about the truth from getting killed. you can leave it to someone who comes after you to refute you and to attack the prejudices that you were unable to attack in your own time. if you try to do it all at once by yourself you'll just confuse people or scare them into closing their minds or get killed or censored. but again this isn't dialectics, I'm just addressing your statement. it's often the case you can't say 100% of the truth without people ignoring you or getting violent with you. what do you do when people aren't ready for it or don't have the framework for it? you have to develop that framework, and you can only develop that framework using the existing means.

>>2826427
Evolution. Darwin did not derive natural selection through a formal logical proof in the mathematical sense. Instead, he worked dialectically in a broad sense: he examined tensions and interactions between opposing tendencies in nature. Organisms produce more offspring than can survive, populations are relatively stable over time, individuals vary from one another, some variations are heritable. The interaction of these seemingly contradictory facts led him to the concept of a "struggle for existence" and, from that, natural selection. His reasoning was synthetic, historical, and relational rather than a deduction from axioms.

Similarly, in plate tectonics, geologists reconciled seemingly contradictory observations: continental fit, fossil distributions, seafloor spreading, earthquakes, mountain builing, into a unified theory. The process was largely dialectical and abductive, not formal deduction.

Strictly speaking, most major scientific discoveries are not obtained by formal logic alone. Formal logic is excellent for checking consistency and deriving consequences from premises. Discoveries usually arise from a mixture of observation, analogy, hypothesis formation, and the reconciliation of contradictions.

>>2825704
yeah but you didn't really read a book about dialectics and then criticize it, you just mischaracterized what it is in the first place

Weighted dialectics fixes this

>>2827672
>Darwin did not derive natural selection through a formal logical proof in the mathematical sense. Instead, he worked dialectically in a broad sense: he examined tensions and interactions between opposing tendencies in nature.

that's not how darwin developed the theory of evolution. he developed it by leaving his house and travelling all over the world on ships and observing lots of wild animals and fossilized skeletal remains in different regions and talking to farmers and asking them questions about their selective breeding practices for plants and animals, writing things down in his journals and gathering lots of information, i.e. a lot of hard work. he didn't do it by sitting on his ass in a cozy armchair philosophizing and bloviating with other intellectual windbags. science is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

dialectics is correct in its first assertion, that reality emerges from the interplay of two fundamental forces, but that assertion was made thousands of years ago by eastern philosophers and is nothing new or revolutionary. where dialectics goes wrong is its following assertion that by understanding the duality we can understand the totality, that there could ever be some kind of synthesis achieved between the two fundamental forces. there can be no novel synthesis, the synthesis was where it all began, long ago, before the One split into two and created the universe. the synthesis vanished the moment our world came into being and it is gone forever.

Step 1.
<The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
<Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
>AI Overview In the late 19th century, opium usage was widespread and socially normalized across the Western world and Asia. It was primarily consumed as an accessible, over-the-counter medicine, though the period marked a cultural shift as governments began to recognize its addictive dangers and impose the first strict regulations
<The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
It's almost like truly understanding and contextualizing these authors requires engaging with questions that were taken for granted then.

Step 2. In Order
>Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §§107–111 (Measure).
>Engels, Anti‑Dühring, chapters on quantity–quality.
>Engels, Dialectics of Nature, “Basic Forms of Motion”, “Heat”, “The Measure of Motion—Work”.
>Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy (for the physical context).
>John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (for the contemporary relevance of that unified cosmos).

There is ONE cosmos, and everything else is simply a tendency or an orientation towards it. This was the project of Engels and with the Hegelian critique of the bad infinite (schlechte Unendlichkeit). The universe necessarily produces every-higher qualitative forms, consciousness, self-knowledge.. All in an eternal cycle of matter in motion. Naturally, not as a meaningless random walk. Multiverse and heat death nihilism is HELL. Exactly what he was trying to ward off by insisting that the conservation and transformation of energy is a spiral of emergence. The nodal points are natures way of guaranteeing that quantitative accumulation always flowers into new qualities.

If you take that route you’ll see reality as a moment in an ongoing struggle and think of the One not as a frozen block or a random explosion, but as a process whose fundamental law is that quantitative movement. At the right nodal point it flips into new being. A cosmos that truly is oriented and not annihilated. Planned economy. Simple as.

>>2830123
When you use grok to digest difficult posts you don't have to re-share that back here champ.

>>2825086
>This is PRECISELY what Hegel says
yeah same i was fuckin lolin @ op