I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
It’s even more than that they exist on a spectrum, they are constantly changing in relationship with their context. It’s systems theory. Every organism is a system, not an impenetrable entity. Each part of the system is also a system. Each system reacts to and influences its environment. Each species is a collection of systems grouped by subsets of properties of those systems. And those properties emerge from system dynamics. This is dialectical.
Right, again, not impenetrable entities but system dynamics.
Yes, I have. But dialectics are not about metaphysics. Dialectics is a methodology that resists models that propose impenetrable entities and instead requires treating all posited entities as systems in themselves, systems that themselves are composed of systems and participate in systems. It’s all models, dialectics just refuses to rest on models of impenetrable entities bouncing off each other.
The critique is that all models work and don’t work, but only dialectics is a methodology for managing the gaps and boundaries between models. Taking biological taxonomy as an example, the model doesn’t work for a lot of things and there is no alternative model to cover those things well. Dialectics would critique that the first model fails explicitly because it relies too heavily on impenetrable entities. It’s useful, but it has boundaries that dialectics can cross.
That is not what dialectical materialism is. That’s what the Hegelian dialectic is. Dialectical materialism is about causality in a universe qua system.
I don’t think there’s any requirement of “two”. Two is just one more than one. It’s quite clear to everyone that when you decompose a system it is not necessarily two things. Marx didn’t identify only two classes nor only two historical modes of production, etc. Two is easier to think about, it’s used instead of the word “many”.
Because there is only one one, and that is everything, or what we call the universe. If we prove the multiverse, than the one thing is the totality of the multiverse. Essentially, everything that exists is contained in the thing that is unitary. That’s the only logical unitary that exists. Everything is a component of “existence” and existence is a system composed of systems.
I think perhaps the problem is that you’re talking about attempting to do science within the framing of ontological models that posit impenetrable entities, and in this case, you’re correct, using dialectics is very difficult if not impossible. What dialectics does is show us that these lossy models leave gaps between them and that when we dig in further we find that the categories that we assumed are rigid are in fact porous and nothing is actually fitting into the categories except through social agreement. And its dialectics that can support us in navigating between models, developing new models, and critiquing existing models accurately.
I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s just that we seem to be working with different definitions of dialectics. Yours seems to be much more broad and all-encompassing. I am just wondering how useful it even is to call it dialectics at that point.
Anyway without getting too sidetracked, i guess what i’m taking from all this is that perhaps i should correct my original point to clarify that what i disagree with is the tendency i have seen from some Marxists to apply the Hegelian dialectic to nature.
Viewing everything in terms of contradictions, of thesis, negation and synthesis, seems unnecessarily restrictive and forced. Your more general take on dialectics in nature being about systems that interact and change is much more reasonable, but also sort of feels redundant…i mean that’s kind of just stating the obvious don’t you think? It’s a bit of a truism.
I actually think that the use of the Hegelian dialectic by Marxists is an error. My first introduction to dialectics was Hegelian but my reading of Mao and many secondary sources has disabused me of what I believe is an error of interpretation. Mao posed the debate as between 1-into-2 versus 2-into-1. 1-into-2 is Spinoza-like: the universe is the only unitary, everything else is part of the universe. You can divide the universe into conceptual parts, but those subdivide and subdivide and interpenetrate. 2-into-1 is Hegelian: there are two distinct things, they interact as wholes and they give combine to become a new thing.
My understanding of Marx and Engels is much better for recognizing these 2 interpretations and interpreting it all through the 1-into-2 lens. 2-into-1 is idealism: the idea that any two things exist in and of themselves, and act upon and are acted upon as units, is a lossy model, an ideal. The reality is the unitary whole of the universe and we divide the 1 into 2 when we examine it. Anything we choose to analyze can be broken down into contributory parts, and is itself a contributory part to a larger scope of concept until you get all the way up to the universe.
Mao made it clear with class analysis: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat do not exist as billiard balls that meet in a social context and come into conflict. Instead, humanity divides itself into groups in many ways that interpenetrate and we can conceptualize yhe emergence of classes of people that are useful for explaining the dynamic of systems.
I don’t think this a truism. I think this sort of thing has been hotly debated by philosophers for millennia. We’re talking about a debate that pits Aristotle against Deluze. It’s far from obvious, but I do think that if you’re steeped in systems theory, contemporary science, and Marxism, it might seem sort of obvious.