people who post takes because they are developing their opinions dialectically
🆚
people who post takes because they are proselytizing
@Lady I'm not trying to do a Dialectics, I just want people to disagree with me so I can understand my own thoughts&ideas&perspectives&intuitions and also their thoughts&ideas&perspectives&intuitions better!
(... and then people don't disagree with me NEARLY enough!)
@gaditb i mean i would argue this is dialectics but
@Lady Look I definitely am not confident that I understand what Dialectics is and what it's doing when it gets used a bunch of the time, but if this is dialectics them I think I still should keep an eye out for which ways dialectics has developed since the Amoraic period.
@gaditb well it is complicated because dialectics is a greek word coined by Plato to describe Socratic dialogues, but it was refined by German philosophy to mean a resolving of contradictions
the way i think of dialectics is this: you have an opinion, and somebody else has an opinion. on their own, each opinion seems relatively reasonable and cohesive. but when brought together, each opinion reveals gaps or unexamined contradictions in the other one. this process of bringing the opinions together allows the opinion-havers to refine their opinions in ways that they could not have on their own
i am not sure that this definition exactly matches either the Platonic or Hegelian or Marxist definition, but it does seem close to what you were describing
@Lady Is the(/a) goal of Doing Dilectics davka /resolving/ contradictions?
Like if I'm just seeking to find, value, and understand contradictions, and not caring overmuch whether or not a resolution happens, is that in the general domain of Dialectics? (let's say Hegel/Marx-type (or are those two also different?), since that's what most people who use it around me mean.)
@gaditb bit complicated i think, because resolving contradictions also produces new contradictions, and also you have to define what “resolving” means
to give a practical example, consider a political party and the people represented by the party. the political party sets the policy, but the people are who the policy is supposed to serve. there is a contradiction here because the policy has to be set by people who do not have the lived experience or understanding of the people the policy is supposed to serve. on the other hand, this contradiction is necessary because it is not an appropriate expectation that your average person on the street be a policy wonk.
so dialectics are necessary to ensure the policy actually benefits the people in ways that it is supposed to benefit them. you could say that if this is successful, this is “resolving the contradiction”. or you could say that the contradiction is inherent and cannot be resolved. but what you do NOT want is for the contradiction to be ignored and the people who set policy to do so without engaging with the public.
so this is kind of the context of dialectics in Marxism as i understand it. it is an attempt to answer the question of how Marxist intellectuals who do not reflect the average worker can nevertheless figure out policies that the average worker will benefit from. so it is a conversation between theory and practice, leaders and workers, and hypothesized ideals and historical experience
this is a different scope and scale than the personal level of a single person developing opinions through conversations with other people. i guess i don¦t have a good answer on whether they can be considered similar or different? it seems kind of different to me but the process also seems kind of the same
@Lady The minor thing this makes me think of is, I decided to have an intuitive discomfort with easily drawing parallels between societal-/group- -level phenomena and analysis and individual-/interpersonal- -level phenomena and analysis. Which feels relevant in response I think maybe but I don't know what if any implication or follow-up that carries here.
@Lady The more significant--
the thing I was thinking about when thinking about "resolution" or not was, like, e.g. the Talmud starts ("at the beginning" is not necessarily where people always start learning talmud, but it's a common point) with a discussion of what time to say evening shema.
https://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.2a?lang=bi
(Read it roughly as a transcript of discussions. Although not necessarily synchronous. Also the part where it says "GEMARA" is jumping to the discussion of a different group of people prompted by the earlier transcript.)
And the thing it builds up/builds toward is not a "... so in conclusion, THIS is the correct time" but instead a compilation, explication, exploration and further contextualization of the various differing opinions surrounding the question and related questions, until a new question becomes the main focus.
@gaditb i think the parallel to this in Marxist analysis is in the idea (paraphrasing here because i do not know the theoretical framing for it) that people encounter contradictions experientially, not intellectually. so you look at the anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, and you say “well, clearly this problem is misdiagnosed. immigrants are not the problem here” but you ALSO say “clearly there is something real that people are experiencing, that is leading them to think in this way”.
and so the goal is that a superficial conversation about “why do communist intellectuals and lay workers disagree on immigration policy?”, which seems tightly scoped, gives way to a deeper interrogation that gets closer to the essence of what is actually going on. and i think the practice of that uncovering is similar (maybe not exactly the same) to what you point to in the Talmud, where an initial question develops into a deeper and more nuanced dialogue
however the motivations are probably different. Marxism is very practical and primarily concerned with establishing correct praxis, which is to say that i think it is ultimately in search of a truth about “the right thing to do / policy to have”. i think part of why dialectics is a slippery term is because it is unclear to me whether it is the process (and skills associated with that process) or the goals/ambitions which is more important. i tend to think of it more as a process which can be applied to many different goals/ambitions, but i suppose others may think that it is the goal/ambition that is more important
@Lady @aescling I guess the third thing I was thinking about in relation to this was like the one-sided-and-I've-never-been-able-to-grab-a-metamodernist-to-discuss-it-with disagreement and/or beef I have with Metamodernism, over the idea of the "pre-post fallacy",
where like maybe this sort (but maybe not?) of "I've looked at these old ideas, and they differ from your ideas which disagree with them, and I've looked at your ideas, and then I've done this Process and derived corrections to both of these ideas to create a NEW idea" move felt (in the video I saw talking about it, to the extent I remember) approximately as useable as an intellectual tool for exploring/iterating on ideas, also as usable as a RHETORICAL tool to be able to say "... so therefore my NEW idea actually incorporates/supercedes* your idea and now your continued disagreement is just a symptom of having not yet done this process, so I can just not listen to you now".
@gaditb [the other way contradictions are “resolved” are by conditions changing; for example the contradictions in the feudal system resolving into the different set of contradictions in the capitalist system. but there are always contradictions]