Fuck me man, what the fuck am I doing. I’m easier than a fat golden retriever.
ON DIALECTICS
First of all, where does this term come from? Well, it refers directly to what is originally known as THE SOCRATIC METHOD. What is that then?
Well, if you read Plato’s works, all featuring a canny Socrates lounging with the who’s who of Athens, you will notice that they are all dialogues. Dialogue, dialect, dialectic, diodes, IBM, no wait shit. Also, it is said that Socrate’s main occupation was sitting around in Athen’s main square, and randomly stopping good citizens (it was later alleged that most of these good citizens were young boys) to ask them questions, and dialect with them about philosophy. It is said, possibly in no small measure because of Socrate’s own allegations in his later trial, that Socrate, by this dialectic method of philosophy, sought to take philosophy away from the ateliers of the very rich and down to the floor level of Athens’ everyday citizen, philosophy for all if you will.
Dialectics, then, is really a term that came after Socrate himself, whose ostensible chronicler was Plate, or Plato. What the term refers to, essencially, is the arrival of truth by dialogue on a subject. I tell you a thing, you tell me a thing back, and through this exchange the contradictions emerge. As a contradiction is revealed, both dialoguers find its resolution by continuing the dialogue, until they arrive at the conclusion. What the method purports is that, through this exchange, the actual truth of a matter is discoverable. The reasons are fairly mystical. Socrate held that there was a sort of metaphysical place where all knowledge is stored, and that by way of a dialogue, this knowledge is retrieved from that place and brought to the dialoguers’ minds.
There was an implication, as well, that this was a truthful method because two people, with an audience preferably, will notice eachother’s contradictions and, between them, will not be able to bullshit and be able, by resolution of the contradictions, to get to that primal metaphysical knowledge that every man (no, not women) has access to; unlike what Socrate called sophism, where a master went to a rich person’s atelier and told their son about a lot of stuff. In Socrate’s mind, this was not metaphysical and was just a hussle where these “masters” made up a bunch of stuff that sounded cool so they could charge a salary. Socrate, of course, charged nothing for his dialects. Though it is said that he later founded a school, for which presumably he did charge. History is vague on this.
Then came a man of extraordinary intellect, one Aristotle. Aristotle studied in Plato’s academy. Plato was one of the children Socrate was accused of corrupting in his famous trial. Based on the ideas he ostensibly retrieved from the dialogues of Socrate, he founded the Academy. (you can easily find his works, On Love, Politeia, etc.). Aristotle was hired by one King Philip the Second of Macedon (presumably they had gotten over all of the outrage at sophism) to instruct his son and those of his closest generals in all the latest Athenian knowledge of stuff. He also happened to be a very prolific thinker himself, and wrote many works based on Plate’s teachings. But the reason his post with the king is so important is that one of his pupils, one Alexander The Great, went on to conquer Greece and then the entire known world up to what we now call India. Importantly, this included Egypt. And so, a tradition of teaching Plate through Aristotle was formed. This tradition continued with some interruptions and lulls in transmission up to this very day. But also, at some point far beyond its establishment, dialectics was taken to mean more than this process of talking. It was taken as a process not requiring an actual conversation where a thesis was postulated, an antitheses that challenged it, and a synthesis where the contradictions arising between both were worked out. This also, as you may have noticed, forms the basis of the Scientific Method as is today taught in all formal schools. Thesis, antitheses, synthesis. What many do not seem to realize, is that this dialectic method really does rely on that metaphysical place, called the Topus Uranus, where perfect knowledge lays in dormant, perfect, and eternal existence, actually existing. If it doesn’t, then of course there is no reason any elimination of any contradictions between any group of people should lead to anything particularly more true than any postulation arrived at some other way. But never mind, our story is not done.
Much later, in what can arguably be called our modern age, one crazy priest called Bentaro started a school in Germany where he taught a very mystical, Christianized idea of Aristotle. He taught that the subtstance Aristotle wrote about is not a kind of figurative catch-all for “anything that qualifies as substance,” but an actual distinct thing. He taught it was a thing that preceded even matter, in that secret and sacred Christian place where soul and matter both are born. Christians have this idea that the human psyche, thoughts and that, exist before matter and are in some way more real. This perhaps was taken from Socrate himself, who talked about that Topus Uranus metaphysical place that held perfect knowledge. And that is the place where Bentaro put “substance.” Among his students where none other than Freud, who arguably took a lot of the mysticism out of the doctrine, and a man called Husserl.
Husserl was very impressed. To name this dimension of substance, that place that is actually even more real than matter, or even the soul, that place where reality so to speak begins, he coined the term: “phenomenology.” As far as he could see, this place Bentaro taught about was at the very least a phenomenon, and so everything was at very least a pehnomenon. Everybody was very impressed by this, and this included one Georg Hegel. Hegel liked the idea very much, and also like Socrate and Plate very much, and he just knew deep down that dialectics, being the core base of all philosophy and actually all reality, must then be phenomenological. If you were to describe reality, you would of course have to describe it phenomenologically, and it would of course have to be dialectics. This was called PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT.
In it, Hegel revealed how the true nature of all human history, which, being Christian, as far as he was concerned was even more real than something like nature or anything beside human, was a dialectic processing of Spirit. He was the first to concieve of this idea that human individuals don’t in the strictest sense exist, but that only a Great Spirit exists which revealis itself dialectically through the course of time. And so, history is this, the unfolding and transformation of this spirit, through dialectics. A thing happens, or thesis postulated, a thing happens to challenge it, or antitheses, and a new balance where the contradictions are smoothed out comes into being, or synthesis. This synthesis then becomes a new thesis awaiting a new antithesis, and so on. Schopenhauer was not impressed by this.
But one KARL MARX was. However, being a hip Socialist (yes, socialism already existed and meant the exact same thing as communism), he didn’t admit it. What he actually said was that Hegel was a weak hearted old man, with his head stuck in the clouds, and that he was super wrong in that he was super correct about everything except that this dialectic was not spiritual, but material. And the dialectic, because he was a hip socialist, was one of the Evil Opressors against the poor, honest Working Man. In his version of this Aristotelian mystic doctrine, the thesis was oppression, the antithesis was the overthrow of opression, and the synthesis a new opression. But slightly different. In his reading, this process would eventually lead to a thesis where all the last of the possible contradictions of opression were present, and the antitheses that overthrew it would then inevitably lead to a synthesis that now did not include opression. He believed that last thesis to be Capitalism but, to be fair to him, he did not absolutely swear it.
Now, of course, if you take dialectics, originally refering literally to the process of dialoguing regarding a subject, to be a metaphysical underpining of reality itself, you will look for it in any and every thing that occurs or has occured. And, being more real than, say, an individual, it will take prescedence over any individual determination. That is what robolutionary meant when he said that dialectics goes deeper than any observable pehomenon. Because, arguable, dialectics IS what observes. Dialectics describes what causes things to happen, like why French jails used to be places where litterally there was a window anywhere an inmate went, where a guard looked at him. These things didn’t happen out of determinations that individuals made, like the architects that designed the jail, but a spiritual dialectic or spirit of history, Zeitgeist (zeit = time, geist = spirit, also possibly mind, that human essence that holds the thoughts, although now not human but spiritually dialectic), that compelled them according to a logic all its own, a dialectic logic of the presentation, challenge and resolution of opression by ruling classes on the proletariat, coming from the Roman word for essencially every free man that wasn’t an aristocrat or important person of some kind.
Dialectics. if you ask me or any other Nietzchean, some pretty sick shit.
DOES THAT SUFFICE SILHOUETTE GODDAMNIT
Ask all the questions you want or present any discussion you please, I got all the time in the world. And let us not fall into the trap of making our waters muddy to make them appear deeper than they are. That is to say, don’t get too fancy with your formulations because i will not have the patience to read them. Salud.