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?
Dialectics isn’t some static thing that popped into the world one day and will suddenly pop out with something else in its place. That’s a metaphysical way of understanding dialectics. Marx or Hegel didn’t invent dialectics. Everyone everywhere has discovered it in some sense. We just have the most coherent philosophical form yet seen for a world that has made computer chips and capitalism. Other lenses we can call dialectical have greater understandings of different axes of the development of knowledge.
The old survives within the new while being in other ways more dead than we realize. Nobility and metaphysics are still around in full and in part as remainders in their successors. Buddhism has an advanced “dialectical” philosophy with many schools and turns and obsolete ideas that were forgotten. In the west we learned from Heraclitus, and people are still influenced by him but his worldview is understood to be incomplete. Spinoza made many philosophical leaps and has been largely left behind for those who were influenced by him, though people still read his work. All these philosophies are dead and alive. They have had their negation do the negation. Marx negated Hegel. Marx has been superseded by Lenin without really dying. One day there may be a successor so advanced that only nerds remember Marx like today they remember Heraclitus.
Dialectics started when people started trying to understand the world. Maybe it will end when we are no longer here to care about truth and reality.
I would even argue that, to some level, pre-notions of later views of Dialects could be seen in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. His conception of the Categorical Imperative relies on the same principles of the contradictory position of opposing ideas determining the correct way of viewing (in his position) moral actions. Though this was less applied to viewing social trends, I think it is interesting to see as a historical perspective.
Kant’s totally in there. Of course, he came after Spinoza and probably developed and disputed his ideas a decent bit. Of course everyone intellectualizing any of these places and times could have had a direct impact on the development of this philosophy. I felt like I had written enough names and didn’t need to add Fichte, Lao Tzu…