what does dialectical mean?

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
version said:
There was a follow up to the thing I mentioned above saying liberalism is partly a rejection of dialectics because "the liberal individual exists as an atom with agency not shaped by anything else".

They were attacking "self-identified communists who have adopted communism as a personal brand through liberal identification".
Click to expand...

Yeah, liberalism at its core is the fetish of the individual entirely alienated from the whole.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
thirdform said:
In fact, the thesis synthesis antithesis is not to be found in hegel's schema. That has more to do with Fichte. So to rib on d'laurent, all dialectical transformations possess a negative content in Hegel. That is what Adorno is trying to reclaim in that book. When you negate the already negated, you get a positive which then also acts as a negative in its very contradictoriness which then can also be subjected to another negation, which leads to another positive stage of development.
Click to expand...
well, this is all way beyond me. but i understood i was describing a marxist dialectic and hegel predates marx - doesn't he? one thing i do know is that Prynne's favourite Mao essay is entitled On Contradiction (which I haven't read of course). sorry if you don't like Prynne @thirdform
thirdform said:
The way Mao put it was 1 divides into 2. Whilst I think that isn't fully correct, it can be right if we account for Mao's colossal error, namely that he wasn't able to realise that 2 multiplies into 1. So we are speaking of dual movement here.
Click to expand...
as the saying goes, hard like chinese arithmetic
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
There's probably some Mongolian blood in me somewhere so realistically I should be ruler of China all things being equal to all other dissensus posters on grounds of having links to the Manchus.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
thirdform said:
Dialogue seems too voluntary. I'm not sure if you have read Banaji's article on the fictions of free labour. But it punctuates that assumption in a lot of Trotskyist marxism that capitalism solely can be said to be extant when there is nothing but free labour.
Click to expand...
True, dialogue does seem too voluntary to use here. I didn't have that in mind when I used it. But yeah, a co-evolution doesn't require that the bodies involved sit down and discuss their strategies.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Key demonstration of dialectical reasoning here for @luka

Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. To understand him, let us begin, first of all, by expounding the passage from Goethe.
That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has [In the manuscript: ‘is’. – Ed.] power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent – the [...] [One word in the manuscript cannot be deciphered. – Ed.] chemical power of society.
Click to expand...

Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not – turns it, that is, into its contrary.
Click to expand...

No doubt the demand also exists for him who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination without effect or existence for me, for a third party, for the [others],||XLIII| and which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between that which exists within me merely as an idea and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me.
If I have no money for travel, I have no need – that is, no real and realisable need – to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study – that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras – essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual – into real powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes.
Click to expand...

The Power of Money, Marx, 1844

Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
www.marxists.org
 
V

version

Well-known member
"Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics.
It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no
supposes, no fractions -- you can't travel in space, you can't go out
into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions -- what
are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths -- what are you
going to do when you go from here to Venus or something -- that's
dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you
either love somebody or you hate 'em."

apocalypse_now_dennis_hopper.jpg
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
I think blake was a bit dialectical wasn't he. He had his schema of reason vs energy, and he preferred energy, but he thought things only got going with the smash of the two together.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
not really sure. i dont understand what dialectical means so i cant say. he says without contraries no progression
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top