Rephrased, will dialectics always exist?
Have fun, because I sure don’t.
edit: if it helps your thinking process a bit, consider this:
- Dialectics explains the process of contradictions. So, does dialectics go through its own contradictions?
- If so, that means dialectics has a process of its own and describes its own process as well. It’s a bit like the “does a set of all sets contain itself” question.
- But if the laws of dialectics are eternal and dialectics does not go through its own process and contradictions, then it would be eternal. Is that possible though?
- And finally of course what are the implications of all of that?
What is your source for this? Abstract concepts demonstrably exist outside the brain. There is an objective definition of proletariat and there is an objective definition of bourgeoisie. Even if I was not aware of the laws of gravity I could not jump and fly away, the objective laws of gravity supersede the idea I have of them. What may be subjective, i.e. coming from our brain, is our understanding of these laws. But that is what dialectics helps us with, is uncover the objective nature of the world. We see that our collective understanding of physics has improved over the centuries, and each time we come to discover their laws a little bit better. I’m interested because you’ve read Politzer and my takeaway from his textbook is that paragraph.
I don’t recall where originally. I think it’s covered somewhere Politzer’s book, which I did read, but it was something I had already had before reading it. Maybe I brought it back with me from a k-hole 🤔
Where? Abstractions are basically classification systems that we invent, because we find them useful in our making sense of the world. But the world exists all the same, with or without our abstractions & conceptualizations of it. The human heart is an abstraction we created, but the more you try differentiate between heart and non-heart, or to delineate the precise boundary between the heart and the not-heart parts of the human body, the fuzzier things get. People interrelated the way that they did both before and after Marx & Engels developed abstractions like proletariat and bourgeoisie.
The universe will do what it does regardless of whatever theories/“objective laws” we concoct to describe it. The universe supersedes our ideas of it. It supersedes the concept of gravity developed by Newton and then radically redeveloped by Einstein.
Edit to add: It’s not that ideas are not real—they are—it’s that the place that they exist is in our brains not any place else, because they were created by our brains through our experience with the world.
I agree with your edit, I think philosophical discussions are difficult over text because it’s not entirely possible to exhaustively explain ourselves that way. I could add more but then I would just be restating what you said in other ways lol