I'm sympathetic to and fascinated by the historical dialecticism in Hegel and Marx, but...the main problem is it just doesn't seem like a process you can extend into the future (something Hegel says outright--in Philosophy of Right, he says that the philosophers will always only be catching up, seeing what has already happened). Marxists try to predict the future using dialectics, a process that seems both wrong-headed and doomed to failure (because to the extent your prediction is accepted, it ends up changing the future).
Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to that position, and if I was going to go into the critique of Marx I would include it. Obliquely, Marx's future orientation was a target I had in mind for my previous posts on the end of the world. Since the invention of the hydrogen bomb, we've had enough close calls to make it an uncomfortably clear possibility that what follows capitalism might not be a more just society but rather human extinction.
I don't think you really managed to answer what dialectics are... here is my attempt. The natural inclination of science is to take everything apart and then take the parts apart, and then take those parts apart too, and put them all in a specimen jar with clear labels. Analytical philosophy does this, like how Martha Nussbaum provides a 14-point checklist for sexual objectification, so you can go through the list and see how many points PlayBoy scores. This is great, but at some point you want to see the big picture, how things hang together.
So for example you look at the evolutions of rabbits and foxes. When a fox catches the slowest rabbit, that is bad for that rabbit, but good for rabbits in general, partially because they evolve to be faster and partially because they do not overpopulate and starve. Similar things can be said about foxes, if a fox starves to death, that is bad for it, but good for foxes.
For some reason not entirely known to me, the world is full of such strange and beautiful contradictions. For example, if a city would legalize pickpocketing, what would happen? I think people would stop carrying valuables and pickpockets would have it harder, not easier.
Yeah... dialectics are notoriously difficult to define. I mean in some ways that difficulty is implied by what I said in the post, that in dialectic you view definition as a process and not something precise and stipulative. And I think you're right that there is at least usually a holism involved in it - looking at the big picture and the larger context.
I'm sympathetic to and fascinated by the historical dialecticism in Hegel and Marx, but...the main problem is it just doesn't seem like a process you can extend into the future (something Hegel says outright--in Philosophy of Right, he says that the philosophers will always only be catching up, seeing what has already happened). Marxists try to predict the future using dialectics, a process that seems both wrong-headed and doomed to failure (because to the extent your prediction is accepted, it ends up changing the future).
Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to that position, and if I was going to go into the critique of Marx I would include it. Obliquely, Marx's future orientation was a target I had in mind for my previous posts on the end of the world. Since the invention of the hydrogen bomb, we've had enough close calls to make it an uncomfortably clear possibility that what follows capitalism might not be a more just society but rather human extinction.
I don't think you really managed to answer what dialectics are... here is my attempt. The natural inclination of science is to take everything apart and then take the parts apart, and then take those parts apart too, and put them all in a specimen jar with clear labels. Analytical philosophy does this, like how Martha Nussbaum provides a 14-point checklist for sexual objectification, so you can go through the list and see how many points PlayBoy scores. This is great, but at some point you want to see the big picture, how things hang together.
So for example you look at the evolutions of rabbits and foxes. When a fox catches the slowest rabbit, that is bad for that rabbit, but good for rabbits in general, partially because they evolve to be faster and partially because they do not overpopulate and starve. Similar things can be said about foxes, if a fox starves to death, that is bad for it, but good for foxes.
For some reason not entirely known to me, the world is full of such strange and beautiful contradictions. For example, if a city would legalize pickpocketing, what would happen? I think people would stop carrying valuables and pickpockets would have it harder, not easier.
Yeah... dialectics are notoriously difficult to define. I mean in some ways that difficulty is implied by what I said in the post, that in dialectic you view definition as a process and not something precise and stipulative. And I think you're right that there is at least usually a holism involved in it - looking at the big picture and the larger context.