Dialectics

Worldly and otherworldly topics
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Ferrus
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Re: Dialectics

Post by Ferrus » Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:12 am

Utisz wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:24 am
Still hazy when we get to Hegel and Marx, but I get the drift. For Hegel, the logical lawyers are our past and present (sometimes contradictory) collective experiences implicitly arguing with each other. For Marx, it's (sometimes contradictory) economic classes and lifestyles implicitly arguing with each other. Something like that?
Yes sort of. To understand Hegel you need to understand the context of the German idealists. So Kant's idea was sort of this: that we don't experience the world directly (what he called noumena) but indirectly as phenomena. He thought we experienced the world mediated by our own... well I suppose he would say consciousness though in modern day terms we would say brain. Something like Douglas Hofstadter would call a strange loop, except it isn't just a simple simulation of the world, but that our mind in interpreting the world adds fundamental elements to the world, like temporal ordering, a sense of causality, geometric/mathematical a priori 'synthetic' concepts - which aren't just logically true but have to demonstrated such as a triangle has angles that add up to 180. And so on. It gets very complicated from there but that is the real nub of it all.* Of course some of this is wrong - Einstein, and arguably even Gauss, Lobachevsky and Reimann before that, demonstrated there is nothing inherent in Euclidean geometry in the universe - but there is also an element of truth about it as well, as neuroscientific evidence has suggested that what we experience as reality is processed heavily. Of course we can investigate the structure of reality beyond our limited experience... personally I think that because our brain is inherently structured and operates according to the logical and causal laws of the universe there isn't really this great divide between how the universe is and how we interpret it, but of course in some ways this is impossible to prove either way. But that's the context.

Hegel, as I understand him (and there are thousands of interpetations), sees these mental structures† in the world as contaning the seeds of their own destruction, like the lawyers as you describe by brute force of their existence offer a 'logical' (see my comment before by what Hegel thought logic meant, he uses words in very strange and idiosyncratic way) argument by virtue of their very emergence as logical consequences of the previous ways of structuring our experience. So for example, he would say that we start off experiencing the world solely as an isolated individual and trying to grasp what we want. But then we discover reality is resistent to us and this is a contradiction to our original sense of being the determiner of what happens. So we discover a new logical mode of thinking that takes into account that we do have desires towards the world (I want apple!) and but the world has an external pressure against us, which leads to our understanding of needing to work on nature to get what we want. And Hegel builds a whole system of thinking around this, from how we start off solipistically thinking only about ourselves, to how we incorporate others. And then on top of this whole societies have the collective series of mental filters that get progressively refined and improved from tribalism to modern liberal states, to how we collectively understand the world moving in a sequence from religion, to art, to science and philosophy. Now much of this is ridiculous from a scientific and evolutionary point of view. And yet... despite his writing's impenetribility you can probably tell that this line of thinking has had influence in some Western countries and how they see themselves. One of the key statesmen involved in founding of the European Union, Alexandre Kojève, was a philosopher who wrote and lectured extensively on Hegel, and you can see why he would consider the EU a Hegelian idea. Roger Scruton also used Hegel's concept of human experience as inherently embedded in the social ways that we 'think' together as a collective to justify his conservative beliefs about society being about 'We' and not the 'I' of what he considered pernicious liberal individualism. And of course his influence on Marx.

Marx basically said that what was important wasn't how our minds grasped the world but the kind of social relations we have between each other in an economic sense because he saw human nature as having an underlying urging for working towards the community as a whole - ironically actually an idea partially inspired by anti-industrialist conservative thinkers. So we start off with tribal 'primitive communism' (much of this has been debunked but anyway) where economic relations were based on equality and everyone providing what they needed without the accumulation of property, which lasted until what we would now call the neolithic revolution where agriculture and cities start to emerge. These new forms of existence - agricultural societies with distinct classes and hierarchical labour relations - are in a sense an 'argument' against the old primitive communism because their material superiority provided them a means to subsume the old tribal relationships. These then slowly face comeptition from first feudalism and the capitalistic forms of human relationships in society. The idea of Marxism is that there will be an agreement at the end of this long debate with older communal forms of communist relationships in terms of property ownership co-existing with the more efficient forms of production agricultural and capitalistic societies have produced.

Yes I actually read all these authors and intepret them on their own merits and try to understand them. This is the downside of being interested in nearly everything.

* He then had a nifty table of 'categories' (which is an idea from Aristotle that there are certain irreducible elements of reality like logic, object extension etc.) which is insanely convoluted and not especially enlightening. He then goes on to argue that based on these fundamental structures of reality you can logically prove that God exists, or he doesn't, or that the universe is infinite, or it isn't, that time is finite or it isn't. Therefore reason, or pure logic cannot actually tell us whether these elements of the universe are true or not (as rationalists like Descartes or Liebniz) thought they might, so he concedes a point to an empiricist like David Hume on this point. He then writes a nifty sequel where he argues even if we can't prove or know God exists we need to act as if he does in order to have a theory of morality based on rationality, that all rational morality (which to him is absolute, no getting out of it) contains the unproven axom of God's existence. He doesn't seem to have considered that it may just be a by-product of human evolution and social relations because this would destroy his theory of the primacy of reason as the underlying principle of human existence.

† He thinks these mental structures ARE the world, in a way, and that the world universe is a sort of mental structure that emerges into fragmented pieces that then get progressively more refined and developed, including human consciousness which is a self-emergent property of the universe's thought process. Which he calls and regards as synonymous with logic. He gets there with detours through embarrassing (and stone-cold debunked) 19th century pseudo-scientific theories such as crude early 19th century understanding of electricity and polarity, pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories and biological taxonomies that were popular at the time, and yes indeed even phrenology, but there we are. And he argues that our own lived experience is in itself a refinement of the universe's thought process because the universe now has self-conscious beings united in societies that collective think about the universe through other minds on a higher and more recursive/self-referential form so the universe is now self-conscious. He thinks this is what "God" is, our collectively developed historical experience of the universe and the human society as a body of embedded mutual thinking that interprets the universe among itself and that old religions such as paganism, Judaism and Christianity - and the art they produce - are crude and primitive forms of what should be really understood as a phenomenon embedded in of us that have been refined out by... the internal dialectic debate of the evolution of human society. But I guess what he was trying to say is that there is a direct of parallel between the universe's 'thinking' and development and the development of our own mind, which leads him to conclude that Kant was wrong, we CAN understand the world as it is without being filtered by our minds because our own minds ARE a part of the universe, albeit disconnected by layers of recursion, that we have to historically develop through dialectics before we see it. In philosophical jargon there is no difference between subject and object. This is what I mean when I say a lot of Hegel is a LCD trip mindfuck. Ironically a small part of what he says, if you interpret it in a limited and very literal way (that I am guessing he would abhor) regarding the universe's inherent mathematically tractable laws of nature has a point in the sense that our brains can't be so separated from the universe as Kant thought it was. And thus its form of interpreting or filtering it must be representative on some level of how the universe actually works.
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Madrigal
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Re: Dialectics

Post by Madrigal » Fri Apr 16, 2021 12:51 am

Ferrus wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:12 am
The idea of Marxism is that there will be an agreement at the end of this long debate with older communal forms of communist relationships in terms of property ownership co-existing with the more efficient forms of production agricultural and capitalistic societies have produced.
I know this is a tangent but, although I read some of Engels on primitive communism, I never saw Marxian philospophy as an ideology that idealized past forms, and it never would have ocurred to me to describe it as a philosphy that sought to upgrade primitive forms of communism with the modern forms of production - or vice versa. I've always seen Marxism as an extremely futuristic philosophy, actually, though it is possible my period of Marx & Engels reading was quickly taken over by 20th Century writers and I forgot the proponderance of that aspect. It definitely isn't going to hook anyone from a recruitment angle if you put it that way... I think. xD
Utisz wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 5:06 am
Appreciate the responses! Basically I've heard people (irl and online) refer to dialetics (in the context of Plato, Hegel, Marx, etc.), and I have zero clue what they are actually talking about (and I do wonder at times, probably unfairly, if they themselves understand what they are talking about ... I am after all an arrogant sob).
We don't. Nobody understands Hegel except maybe Ferrus, and I can't prove that.

In my ex commie circles we had a joke about how only one person actually understood Hegel and so everyone who had any doubts had to go to this one person. There was also an expression that was immediately taken as a joke by everyone, "It's dialectical," accompanied by a hand gesture which essentially looks like you're holding an imaginary jar of pills between your index finger and thumb and shaking it to see if it still has pills in it. This phrase and accompanying gesture basically meant you had no idea wtf you were talking about so you may as well use a philosophical reference everyone (of course) totally understood.

Anyway, nevermind Plato - in layman's terms, I'd say something "dialectical" describes an interaction between two distinct entities or forces. As they interact, they transform their own nature. As this nature is transformed by the interaction, at some point the transformation makes a leap from a change in quantity to a change in quality. When someone says "it's dialectical" and they shake that imaginary jar of pills, this is what they're talking about. It's very useful to describe how socioeconomic structures change and class consciousness develops.

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Re: Dialectics

Post by Ferrus » Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:14 am

Madrigal wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 12:51 am
I know this is a tangent but, although I read some of Engels on primitive communism, I never saw Marxian philospophy as an ideology that idealized past forms, and it never would have ocurred to me to describe it as a philosphy that sought to upgrade primitive forms of communism with the modern forms of production - or vice versa. I've always seen Marxism as an extremely futuristic philosophy, actually, though it is possible my period of Marx & Engels reading was quickly taken over by 20th Century writers and I forgot the proponderance of that aspect. It definitely isn't going to hook anyone from a recruitment angle if you put it that way... I think. xD
Well, both primitive communism and capitalism were to Marx ultimately pathological forms of society that had to be superceded so it wasn't really ever idealised but I would say that his writings suggest that he thought older forms of society may have expressed essential elements of human nature suppressed by capitalist modernity that he thought could then be reconciled or reborn in a future system - in a way that was the essence of the conception of alienation. This letter seems explicit evidence that he held this view. Though I do think this element in Marx's thought was downplayed by Lenin into something more futurist - I mean Lenin delberately promoted Taylorism and American Fordist production techniques in the early Soviet Union - because Marxism in Russia - and to a lesser extent in China - because they developed in reactionary, semi-feudal countries where something like modernity was being held back by traditional social structures. Whereas Marx himself was writing in the context of places with developed liberal industrial economies such of Britain, France and Germany that saw a lot more of human life mediated through economic exchanges.
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Re: Dialectics

Post by Mashy » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:34 am

It's a noun specifically used to describe a post made by Ferrus.

Example:
"Oh, did you happen to catch the post by Utizs?"
"Was that before or after the Ferrus dialectic?"

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Re: Dialectics

Post by Ferrus » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:14 pm

Mashy wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:34 am
It's a noun specifically used to describe a post made by Ferrus.

Example:
"Oh, did you happen to catch the post by Utizs?"
"Was that before or after the Ferrus dialectic?"
A dialectic in the head of one person would be an "autodialectic" surely?
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Re: Dialectics

Post by SomeInternetBloke » Sat Apr 17, 2021 4:32 am

Ferrus wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 6:56 am
It is used by different ways in different contexts.

The original use was related to Greek philosophy and the use of discussions to draw out definitions and conclusions.
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Re: Dialectics

Post by Mashy » Sat Apr 17, 2021 6:53 am

Ferrus wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:14 pm
Mashy wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:34 am
It's a noun specifically used to describe a post made by Ferrus.

Example:
"Oh, did you happen to catch the post by Utizs?"
"Was that before or after the Ferrus dialectic?"
A dialectic in the head of one person would be an "autodialectic" surely?
Apologies, I forgot to add Roger Mexico to the equation

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Re: Dialectics

Post by Utisz » Sat Apr 24, 2021 8:53 am

Ferrus wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:12 am
Utisz wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:24 am
Still hazy when we get to Hegel and Marx, but I get the drift. For Hegel, the logical lawyers are our past and present (sometimes contradictory) collective experiences implicitly arguing with each other. For Marx, it's (sometimes contradictory) economic classes and lifestyles implicitly arguing with each other. Something like that?
Yes sort of. To understand Hegel you need to understand the context of the German idealists. So Kant's idea was sort of this: that we don't experience the world directly (what he called noumena) but indirectly as phenomena. He thought we experienced the world mediated by our own... well I suppose he would say consciousness though in modern day terms we would say brain. Something like Douglas Hofstadter would call a strange loop, except it isn't just a simple simulation of the world, but that our mind in interpreting the world adds fundamental elements to the world, like temporal ordering, a sense of causality, geometric/mathematical a priori 'synthetic' concepts - which aren't just logically true but have to demonstrated such as a triangle has angles that add up to 180. And so on. It gets very complicated from there but that is the real nub of it all.* Of course some of this is wrong - Einstein, and arguably even Gauss, Lobachevsky and Reimann before that, demonstrated there is nothing inherent in Euclidean geometry in the universe - but there is also an element of truth about it as well, as neuroscientific evidence has suggested that what we experience as reality is processed heavily. Of course we can investigate the structure of reality beyond our limited experience... personally I think that because our brain is inherently structured and operates according to the logical and causal laws of the universe there isn't really this great divide between how the universe is and how we interpret it, but of course in some ways this is impossible to prove either way. But that's the context.

Hegel, as I understand him (and there are thousands of interpetations), sees these mental structures† in the world as contaning the seeds of their own destruction, like the lawyers as you describe by brute force of their existence offer a 'logical' (see my comment before by what Hegel thought logic meant, he uses words in very strange and idiosyncratic way) argument by virtue of their very emergence as logical consequences of the previous ways of structuring our experience. So for example, he would say that we start off experiencing the world solely as an isolated individual and trying to grasp what we want. But then we discover reality is resistent to us and this is a contradiction to our original sense of being the determiner of what happens. So we discover a new logical mode of thinking that takes into account that we do have desires towards the world (I want apple!) and but the world has an external pressure against us, which leads to our understanding of needing to work on nature to get what we want. And Hegel builds a whole system of thinking around this, from how we start off solipistically thinking only about ourselves, to how we incorporate others. And then on top of this whole societies have the collective series of mental filters that get progressively refined and improved from tribalism to modern liberal states, to how we collectively understand the world moving in a sequence from religion, to art, to science and philosophy. Now much of this is ridiculous from a scientific and evolutionary point of view. And yet... despite his writing's impenetribility you can probably tell that this line of thinking has had influence in some Western countries and how they see themselves. One of the key statesmen involved in founding of the European Union, Alexandre Kojève, was a philosopher who wrote and lectured extensively on Hegel, and you can see why he would consider the EU a Hegelian idea. Roger Scruton also used Hegel's concept of human experience as inherently embedded in the social ways that we 'think' together as a collective to justify his conservative beliefs about society being about 'We' and not the 'I' of what he considered pernicious liberal individualism. And of course his influence on Marx.

Marx basically said that what was important wasn't how our minds grasped the world but the kind of social relations we have between each other in an economic sense because he saw human nature as having an underlying urging for working towards the community as a whole - ironically actually an idea partially inspired by anti-industrialist conservative thinkers. So we start off with tribal 'primitive communism' (much of this has been debunked but anyway) where economic relations were based on equality and everyone providing what they needed without the accumulation of property, which lasted until what we would now call the neolithic revolution where agriculture and cities start to emerge. These new forms of existence - agricultural societies with distinct classes and hierarchical labour relations - are in a sense an 'argument' against the old primitive communism because their material superiority provided them a means to subsume the old tribal relationships. These then slowly face comeptition from first feudalism and the capitalistic forms of human relationships in society. The idea of Marxism is that there will be an agreement at the end of this long debate with older communal forms of communist relationships in terms of property ownership co-existing with the more efficient forms of production agricultural and capitalistic societies have produced.

Yes I actually read all these authors and intepret them on their own merits and try to understand them. This is the downside of being interested in nearly everything.

* He then had a nifty table of 'categories' (which is an idea from Aristotle that there are certain irreducible elements of reality like logic, object extension etc.) which is insanely convoluted and not especially enlightening. He then goes on to argue that based on these fundamental structures of reality you can logically prove that God exists, or he doesn't, or that the universe is infinite, or it isn't, that time is finite or it isn't. Therefore reason, or pure logic cannot actually tell us whether these elements of the universe are true or not (as rationalists like Descartes or Liebniz) thought they might, so he concedes a point to an empiricist like David Hume on this point. He then writes a nifty sequel where he argues even if we can't prove or know God exists we need to act as if he does in order to have a theory of morality based on rationality, that all rational morality (which to him is absolute, no getting out of it) contains the unproven axom of God's existence. He doesn't seem to have considered that it may just be a by-product of human evolution and social relations because this would destroy his theory of the primacy of reason as the underlying principle of human existence.

† He thinks these mental structures ARE the world, in a way, and that the world universe is a sort of mental structure that emerges into fragmented pieces that then get progressively more refined and developed, including human consciousness which is a self-emergent property of the universe's thought process. Which he calls and regards as synonymous with logic. He gets there with detours through embarrassing (and stone-cold debunked) 19th century pseudo-scientific theories such as crude early 19th century understanding of electricity and polarity, pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories and biological taxonomies that were popular at the time, and yes indeed even phrenology, but there we are. And he argues that our own lived experience is in itself a refinement of the universe's thought process because the universe now has self-conscious beings united in societies that collective think about the universe through other minds on a higher and more recursive/self-referential form so the universe is now self-conscious. He thinks this is what "God" is, our collectively developed historical experience of the universe and the human society as a body of embedded mutual thinking that interprets the universe among itself and that old religions such as paganism, Judaism and Christianity - and the art they produce - are crude and primitive forms of what should be really understood as a phenomenon embedded in of us that have been refined out by... the internal dialectic debate of the evolution of human society. But I guess what he was trying to say is that there is a direct of parallel between the universe's 'thinking' and development and the development of our own mind, which leads him to conclude that Kant was wrong, we CAN understand the world as it is without being filtered by our minds because our own minds ARE a part of the universe, albeit disconnected by layers of recursion, that we have to historically develop through dialectics before we see it. In philosophical jargon there is no difference between subject and object. This is what I mean when I say a lot of Hegel is a LCD trip mindfuck. Ironically a small part of what he says, if you interpret it in a limited and very literal way (that I am guessing he would abhor) regarding the universe's inherent mathematically tractable laws of nature has a point in the sense that our brains can't be so separated from the universe as Kant thought it was. And thus its form of interpreting or filtering it must be representative on some level of how the universe actually works.
That kind of approaches making sense I guess. It reminds me of the times I've tried to iron a shirt. I didn't succeed, I didn't know why I tried, but the trying of it felt important.

Hegel, eh. I wonder what he would have made of Pollock.

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Re: Dialectics

Post by Ferrus » Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:51 pm

Going back to the original Greek definition, maybe dialetics was powerful (and Socrates' method for that matter) because of the social aspect of reasoning talked about here:



There is a podcast here too of the original author of this theory Dan Sperber: https://www.theguardian.com/science/aud ... ly-podcast

I suppose more evidence is needed but it does make sense intuitively that we would have developed reasoning evolutionarily for social purposes, planning hunts and arranging ever more complex tribes of humans living togther (and thus increasing Dunbar's number, see here: https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria ... riendships). There is a weird, pale, reflection of Hegelian thinking in that too.

If that's true, then the reason Socrates had so much effect (and was disturbing) is he tapped into that self-justification mode we all have when using reason to justify or work through our decisions, prejudices and other irrational feelings in order to reveal their own absurdity. This is why I believe many law schools across the world teach it as an advocacy method to get information out of people at trials.

Interestingly Jonathan Haidt was involved in this movement too:

http://www.rudygarns.com/class/neuroeth ... l_tail.pdf

Interesting because he has been a critique of technocracy and an 'explainer' of populism in terms of intuitive moral reasoning butting up against the modern world (and different people have different sets of gut feeling, the whole WEIRD idea). Which makes me wonder (as a hypothesis) if the concept of dialectics as a psychological function maybe has something to say about our present malaise.
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Re: Dialectics

Post by Utisz » Wed May 05, 2021 5:33 am

Ferrus wrote:
Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:51 pm
Going back to the original Greek definition, maybe dialetics was powerful (and Socrates' method for that matter) because of the social aspect of reasoning talked about here:
Reason as a sort of social justification for intuition is kind of an interesting concept, and it makes sense in terms of the idea of confirmation bias. The idea of a lottocracy is kind of intriguing too, though unabated populism cannot be a good thing either, can it?

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