Understanding the Dialectic 

that's not a Bullet, that's a Bomb!

The James Lindsay dialectic: he synthetizes such an amount of information & knowledge in 32 minutes that the listener's head explodes 🤯 much love, legend! ❤

I found "Science of Logic" to be a better exposition of what the dialectic's modus operandi was to Hegel than any of his Phenomenologies, although they provide seminal demonstrations of the method. In SoL, Hegel really believed he was laying out the natural ground of the dialectic. Keep in mind that Hegel despised Newton and other British Enlightenment thinkers like Locke because he believed empiricism was flawed and not "real philosophy." Science was just gaining steam at the time and Hegel believed his programme a superior alternative to the lowly Brits. This really comes through in SoL, and later, Marx trumpets historical materialism as a continuation of the same "scientific" enterprise. Good stuff. Thanks for sharing.

Really makes you think how many people actually participate in the dialectic unwittingly. Think of all the times you’ve heard someone in an argument say “the truth must be somewhere in the middle” I’ve always thought that was an absurd simplistic platitude. If I’m right, and you’re wrong, the truth is not somewhere in the middle. That’s just what wrong people say to make themselves feel less dumb

Thanks the dialectic was the hardest for me to grasp

Aufhebung is like jam. It annihilates the berries, but preserves them and elevates them to a new.

Damn. Finally someone explains this crap in layperson terms. This was the best piece I've ever heard on this. I think I finally understand what's wrong with the left.

That last line about their synthesis not being orgaic and therefore not touching reality resonates with me.

James has pulled the lynch pin and loosed the Gordian Knot. It can’t unravel fast enough!!!

11:18 "You have opposites on a horizontal level and you have vertical dimension of understanding on higher plane. Of course, when you believe you are understanding on a higher plane, you start to make yourself into a priest that's going to tell all the stupid people who don't understand the difference what the difference is. You're going to become their intellectual or political master. And that' really what the point of the dialectic is." "It's to make things complicated so you can sit on top and tell people what they are by mixing together opposites in a way that don't make sense. The dialectic is the combination of opposites so that you are claiming to see them from some higher level that is necessarily synthetic." 31:02 "The problem is the dialectic. The problem is using negation to make progress, to cut down in order to get somewhere. That's actually the problem. And so, I don't know if this is a clarifying definition or explanation of the dialectic, but the dialectic is a combination of opposites so that you can see them from a higher perspective that only the wizards can understand. Fascism has its own wizards. Communism has its own wizards. It doesn't matter who they are. They're the super special priest class, that they're the only ones who can understand the actual mysteries of the complex society.

I've been thinking about the identity thing... I don't identify as a woman, I just am a woman... kinda how God says 'I am who I am' ... under this 'new religion' it isn't enough to just be... they have to tell you who you are. A lot of this 'new religion' does a lot to obscure one from God and interferes with one's ability to know or be close to God. It's a shame to see so much of the church doesn't see this stuff for what it is... they weren't joking when they said the devil can quote scrupture.

32 minutes! Short? Wooo!

An absolutely brilliant overview of this critically important area of intellectual thought. Thank you so much.

Love these shorter clips James!!

It sounds like you're describing metamodernism. Which makes complete sense.

The dialectic is so important to understand, you can see it everywhere. Like "Here is a problematic thing (thesis), and if we respond with this thing (antithesis/the opposite), then we'll get a perfect higher balance! (synthesis). And then we start the whole equation again, as the synthesis becomes the status quo. But it's actually alchemical magical thinking. It never ends. In actual hard physics, matter and anti-matter DESTROY each other. Hegel's idea was abstract and fantastical, kind of a fun idea to think about, but Marx made it material and literal, and now these idiot marxists (who self-identify as "opposition" or "resistance") just want to flip everything around, they want to ruin everything, and they believe that magically some higher synthesis will rise of it. They just want to contradict and problematize everything that is, so a higher being can rise out of it, just somehow magically spontaneily🤷🏻‍♂️ it's a magical alchemical religious ideology. GET REAL.

This feels like when I was young in English literature classes and they asked us to review literature. And they would come up with things and I never understood it because it seemed like you could just make up any old answer as long as you could make some argument for it. It seems like dialectic just means take two opposite things, make some bs justification for how to combine them and claim that justification as knowledge. Bizarre.

Maybe I missed something, but it all seems like unfalsifiable magical thinking.

BRILLIANT! Thanks Dr.James!👍🙏♥️

By what you said fascism still isn't right wing it's still socialism its just with a tighter focus.

Awesome video, loved it!

I view this concept is very understandable. Cause when you think of it. try to define a color for example. It is actualy a mix of all colors. Red is not simply red. But red yellow and all color at same time in theory. Cause if you take away the yellow hint in the red you get another color.

Eleven minutes in and it just sounds like pure Plato so far.

I've been reading Life and Fate and near the middle of the book there's an old Bolshevik in a German POW camp who gets called to an officer's office. He thinks he's going to be tortured (physically) and instead the SS officer starts talking to him about Hegel, calls him teacher, and starts going on about how the Nazis and the USSR are really the same and shouldn't be in conflict. Thanks to James I understood what was happening here was that the SS officer was trying to apply the dialectic to Germany and Russia and synthesize the "opposites". If I didn't understand the dialectic from James that scene would've made no sense to me.

The Dialectic concept reminds me of a misapplication of the Taoist concept of Yin and Yang.

If being a leftist is just being against the status quo then we would all be leftists here.

To understand dialectical arguments, I always think of "peas and carrots." One person only thinks you can eat peas, the other person only thinks you can eat carrots. Then the know-it-all comes along and says "why not both?" And so the two people arguing realize the know-it-all is so great and they think he's wise. That's it. Dialectics is no more complicated than the "why not both?" meme, except you do it to up your clout instead of joking. Or maybe you up your clout while making a joke. That would be a meta-dialectic.

These concepts are so insane at the core, how do they ever gain and maintain any traction?

There's a scene from The Red Scare from 1949 where the rookie communist asks the meeting leader what she means by democracy. She says "rule by the people" and he says "which people? And what does Karl Marx mean by dictatorship of the Proletariat? That's just rule by SOME people." Then they take home outside and knock him out (kill him) and the Twilight Zone style newspaper headline flashes "Young CPUSA party member killed for being a communist! Communist Party demands justice!"

Dude. James, thats a cool riff man. Bluesy.

Peaky Blinders S5E3 34:10 Tommy says "...for them its just the same, communism, fascism; for most people its an apple and an apple.." 👌

Getting better with your intros, James.

Well explained, tnx

Great video!!

This quote from Hegel: "It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal. Having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end is it actual." That statement is a tautology, and therefore can not be logically disproved. And, given that the statement is making an argument about abstract ideas, and not objects which exist in reality, it is only a rational argument if you accept it's premise, which is, of course, also it's conclusion.

Dialectic is a somewhat difficult concept to define. Philosophy? Reasons?

This is a fascinating explanation of the conceptual framework of the dialectic. I’m still a bit hazy though. It seems like the dialectic framework itself is rooted in a true method of understanding, but the problem may be its misapplication? For instance, and I may be misapplying the concept here, the idea of interdependence in a marriage relationship or a work relationship is a higher order state of being than either being in a dependent or an independent relationship. I believe that to be a true principle. Is this a dialectical way of perceiving this progression? Also, the famous John Stuart Mill statement on not being able to fully understand your own argument until you have a complete understanding of the opposite argument also seems to have a dialectical substrate. I guess my question/confusion surrounds when and how the dialectical approach makes sense and when it does not? Is the main problem with the dialectical not that it tries to compare opposites but it’s insistence on placing the theory above the reality?

I don't know that the placement of fascism on the right is actually correct. It was socialists who invented fascism, and it wasn't because they want to move social to the political right. It seems like the political spectrum was shifted to a different backbone after WWII. The academic left were embarrassed by their support for Hitler so they moved politics from a backbone of power (who controls what) to a backbone of property (who owns what). This artificially moved fascism (and hence the Nazis) to the political right, when everyone at the time knew fascism was an invention of the left.

Great job. Great work. Salute 2 you.

Literally!!

We have to find the errors in the premises and correct them. For instance, we are not social beings. There are too many anti-social and introverted types to consider that true. We are familial. We look for like minds and hearts. That puts the correct spin on things. We are not intrinsically interdependent and never were. There are too many people who prove they can live independently. We have learned to improve our way of life by being cooperative. We are a cooperative being, and we are already doing that, so no change is called for. And so on.

Hegel was concerned with psychology. Conceptually concepts moving into their opposites is a very basic observation.

Good vid

I agree with the points you presented from Hegel. That is, until "Reason is conveniently what he believes to be the case." There is a lot of talk about fallacies in philosophy, but what isn't talked about as often is what might be called "ipse dixit". This means, "because I say so" and it stands in for trying to make a statement of fact without any grounding or rational explanation at all. It is worse than a fallacy, because there is no argument made. It is simply a blind assertion that, when couched in various word salad, is expected to be swallowed whole without question. This rhetorical move seems to be the specialty of the left. The assumption is that if the audience is stupid enough, they won't see the card go up the sleeve and just accept that the claim follows from the rest of the rhetoric. The problem is that they are correct. Just as in some of the famous algebra proofs where a slightly difficult to find "mistake" is made such that it is proven that 0 = 1, the leftist propaganda always (and I mean that literally) seems to come down to these bogus moves made with a bold certainty and hoping that their audience won't notice... which they usually don't. Partially because they aren't smart enough, but also because they want to believing the infantilizing narrative that is always the endpoint of leftism: the misconception that remaining a child will bring more happiness than assuming responsibility as an adult.

This is surprisingly well done, especially in comparison to many philosophers' attempts to exposit the notion of dialectical approaches to various familiar dichotomies. It falls into caricature, however, when it begins to describe dialectic as 'theory instead of experience' - a crude oversimplification that could itself do with some dialectical criticism - in this case, courtesy of Kant. As Kant noted long ago, 'concepts [theories] without experience are empty, experience without concepts [theory] is blind.' The silly old 'rationalists versus empiricists' dispute before Kant was ridiculous precisely because it assumed you could have one of those two things - experience and understanding- without the other, when in fact both are inseparably linked where there is actual understanding - i.e., the ordering of the welter of experience through conceptually-informed understanding. And all dialectics is is the practice of noticing how many *other* distinctions we unthinkingly draw end up being false dichotomies that merely reflect incomplete understanding. As such it is quite neutral as between 'left' and 'right' ideologies. There are rightwing dialecticians (like Hegel himself and the Prussian authorities who elevated his philosophy into the state ideology) just as there are leftwing dialecticians (like Marx and the self-described 'Left Hegelians'). And there are rightwing antidialectical morons and simpletons (like George W. Bush) just as there are leftwing antidialectical morons and simpletons (like Joe Scarborough).

The more I hear about Hagle and Marx the more I think "Wow these guys loves to smell their own farts."

Michelle Obey-ma's book title: ♂️Becoming♀️.

thinking you're the priest class when half the world thinks you're the clown class

Good video! I’m experiencing some dissonance, though, in the sense that “the dialectic” here has a specific meaning, but the conversation “lacking a dialectic” is something I say all the time when criticising the woke. Like “the reason I’m concerned about this [enforced thing] is not that I hate black people, but that the process lacks a dialectic”. In this sense I’m using “dialectic” to mean the process of bashing two opposing ideas together using reason to figure out how to proceed without getting upset. Should I stop using that term in this way? 😅

I'm not a philosophy expert, but I've heard podcasts about early philosophers (ie. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) that said that dialectic was also an integral part of their philosophy. Has the left hijacked those earlier concepts of dialectic argument ... what is the difference? I will research this on my own, but if anyone can save me some time it would be much appreciated.

Sounds good to me

Fascinating, I don't recall Hegel writing, "Reason is agreeing with all of what I just said." Seems like there was a whole lot more to his definition of Reason. If indeed that is true, which it is, then leaving those parts out in order to put the cart before the horse and advance an anti-Hegelian agenda by misrepresenting what he actually thought, is Sophistry, and deception of your audience.

interesting ideas. At 28.15 you say 'moving away from the status quo is by definition leftist. That is what leftist means.' I am not sure I follow this. Does 'right-ist' therefore mean always stick to the status quo? In the world where I live, even people on the right want change. The friction seems to be on how we need to change, and people with different life experiences tend to want different changes. That's why we have elections, and that's why we want as many voices heard as possible.

Again, Plato's dialectic of Absolutes (Parmenides) doesn't result in Absolute knowledge, but an either/ or proposition. "If One is not, the nothing is." There is always a "split" in the circle.... a lamella... a 'surplus value'....

Dang, miss ye on twitt

Anyone notice that Jesus did away with the priest class as "special" by making every believer a priest? Small wonder he was hated by the religious system of his day (and yet humans have, again, tried to rebuild what he challenged).

To James - I know this isn't really your wheelhouse, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the connection (if any) to the acceleration of Woke and it's prominence in our culture online, and the loss of internet oversight by IANA and ICANN. It seems to me like the current generation of cultural problems we face right now can be traced back to the loss of US oversight over the Internet, as groups like the WEF replaced IANA and ICANN.

With all due respect, the Hegelian Dialectic is definitely not the Thesis, Anti-thesis and Synthesis thing at all. So, let’s see what is Hegelian Dialectic. According to Hegel, the dialectic “is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual." -Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit You start from the immediate thing at hand through the sense-certainty and perception to find out the properties of the thing. Then, you go to Understanding phase which is the highest stage of Consciousness in order to discover the potentiality inherent in the thing at hand. This is the process of reflection-into-itself. This will give the Essence, the Truth, or the Ideality, the Goal, or the Identity of the thing at hand which is something Universal (being-in-itself). Then you go to Difference which is the reflection-into-another, which in turn is the Particular (being-for-another). Here the opposition and contradiction appear. For the contradiction to be resolved, it got to lead to the essential unity between the Identity and Difference which is the purpose and it constitutes the Final Cause for the resolution of this contradiction. This Final Cause, is Self-Consciousness (being-in-and-for-itself). It is the Subject. The purpose, the final cause, must fuse with the Will to Destiny by an individual and it should turn into focused Passion. That should lead to Reason. Reason is Purposive Activity. Reason is composed of Negative Dialectical Reason and Positive Speculative Reason. Reason in its act, sublate the immediate being and the new being is a sublated reality, which is called the Actual. Sublation is the unity of three acts: negation, preservation and sublation. Actual is the End. This whole movement is called dialectical or rational movement which is also the unity of Subject-Object. Historical Materialism of Marxists just like the Thesis/Anti-thesis/Synthesis thing has nothing to do with Hegelian Dialectic either. Both of these conceptions of dialectic are nothing but misconception of Hegelian Dialectic.

You volunteer to limit your freedom on the road primarily because it is in your immediate self-interest to do so. It is a mutually-beneficial and unspoken agreement that we all enter into every time we drive. We have the freedom to swerve into oncoming traffic if we so choose, but that would be foolhardy and self-destructive. So I'm not sure that the driving analogy truly "drives" the point home; although I get the overall point that you are making.

I find this an extraordinarily cynical take on the dialectic. You make it sound, James, as if novelty itself (something new becoming) and synthesis itself (two partial truths coming together into something higher) is intrinsically politically Leftist, and even totalitarian. But the dialectic is a feature of reality. A man and woman come together and complement one another (synthesis), and the result is a novel human being (becoming). A child grows into an adult while retaining characteristics of the child (aufheben/sublation). Just because Marxists have stolen these words, don't pretend they own reality. Capitalism tempering itself with social responsibility is much needed. Should Marxists be defining social responsibility? No. But they're going to until somebody else does.

I already understood Hegelian Dialectics pretty good, mainly due to Polish author Krzysztof Karoń and his probably best analysis of Marxism and neo-Marxism I've seen and read. There are many other authors, scholars and speakers in Poland who talk about it, but Karoń made a warp jump with his methodic, ampleness of material, peculiar way of lecturing, and most importantly - his commitment in effect of his realization of the grave danger exerted by neo-Marxism + Postmodernism on mankind. He also attempted to devise a consistent Civil Knowledge Program, which could give ppl, especially teenagers, initial knowledge and apparatus to recognize neo-Marxist influence and indoctrination. I shall certainly add to this our specific experience with SocRealism, and these freaky intellectuals and scholars graduating from Marxist political economy who specialized in Dialectical Materialism - that is zombie eggheads with briefcases, speaking absolute rubbish when accosted. I'd like to point out a thing, which from the very beginning should be absolutely clear for someone with technical/engineering background - the "antithesis" isn't really any "opposition" or "negation", it isn't even close, because if it was, the opposites would annihilate out of necessity, and thus no outcome = "synthesis" could be obtained. Reversing this - to have non-null result, Dialectical operands (thesis & antithesis) must consist of at least some non-opposite elements. Contrary to that, in the Dialectic, after the arbitrary choice of "thesis" (which is obvious), the choice for "antithesis" is also absolutely arbitrary, which is a corruption on "anti-", the Aufhebung operation is undefined and too arbitrary, thus "synthesis" is basically whatever "must" be proven. So, it's all again the question of intentional language corruption - concoction of pseudo-philosophical word salad, as a facade for false authoritarian argumentation. It should be mentioned, that neo-Marxists theoretically fight authoritarianism, and maintain, after Young Hegelians (especially Cieszkowski), that philosophy generally has been "completed" by Hegel, thus they only practice action - praxis. All these "social scientists" infected by this "teaching" and specializing in it, obviously do not utilize simple, natural logic, which makes me wonder: what idea Hegel had about the logic of combining opposites? Turns out - his own!, described in "Science of Logic" (SL/WdL). It actually totally breaks with natural logic and common sense. Diving into the lecture one will inevitably sink through an ever denser bog of trivializations, groundless assumptions, mixing strict and colloquial definitions of terms, inconsistence of application of operations (negation) and expectations as to their subsequent outcomes. The "logic" itself utilizes the Aufhebung operation, for which it shall only establish philosophical grounds, and thus introduces circular dependency between itself and the Dialectic. In fact it's a looped, ordered algorithm, coded in an informal, esoteric language, rather than an actual logic! Eventually, it starts to more resemble an esoteric belief system, like Astrology, than an actual philosophy. I've absolutely no idea, how anyone could even treat it as anything serious? How on Earth the sane, natural logic, loses with this? IOW, how is it even a thing? Leftists fight with good old Christian logic bragging that it's outdated, that they have newer and better one, and then come up with this piece of esoteric babbling? - are you kidding me?? I think, I just started to understand why Hegel's work had to become "completion of philosophy" and why "death of philosophy" and eventually "death of God" must've been trumpeted. For me, it actually means, that natural logic and common sense must be defended and preserved, because it's the only way out of this madness of encroaching Hegelianism - it's the Humanity's only rescue!

Urgh. My head hurts, i'm glad I only have to listen to this once. It's no wonder people whose heads have been hammered with this kind of ideology since kindergarten can't think.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Adam Smith ..... "The masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.” Adam Smith.... "The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it." Adam Smith...... “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords…love to reap where they have never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come…to have an additional price fixed upon them.” Adam Smith... ADAM SMITH, this supposed stalwart defender of "free-market" capitalism also packed into his book a riot of observations that give comfort and support to those who know that modern markets are never actually free. That Smith could be both pro- and anti-capitalist within the confines of a single tome might be hard for some hard to believe, but it is true.

Is there a video anywhere as to what James actually believes himself? I would like to become a member but want to understand his own belief's. Does he believe in god? Thanks

10/10

Matter and antimatter

❤

Hegellian Dialectic - One big Appeal to the Expert Fallacy

Speed and position can't both be known

An epistemological Tower of Babel

When do we strike at the root?

They've turned the word woman into a variable which they can place any meaning into. It's a placeholder for whatever data the user wants to fill it with.

Hmmm. I am more on a spiritual path rather than a political or intellectual path. To me JL is absolutely brilliant. Nobody has ever humbled my intellect like JL does. It's like the way Ken Wilber humbles me on the topic of consciousness. In a reality where there is a tangible world outside you (3D), James is the master of this reality. He sees very clearly through the contradiction like nobody I have ever listened to. Seeing through the contradiction, you are at a higher perspective. You see the truth l, at one with The All. In my spiritual growth, which involves months long meditation retreats on the other side of the world regularly, I have been exposed to the idea of One. Maya being the contradiction, the illusory world. Contradiction is the law of the land in the third dimension. What I find incredible is that Hermetic ideas that make three dimensional reality a prison and hell, the same Hermetic principles are the key to escaping three dimensional reality all together. It's like Three Card Monty. You can "win" by taking others who can't see the game, but you also "win" when you know the game well enough not to be played. Hermetic principles can are used to make material existence unbearable. Hermetic principles can and are used to transcend from a material existence to Spiritual one.

this is not a pipe...this is not a brick,its a hammer

A joke from 1990, referring to Political Correctness. The committee had to choose between two black lesbuans in wheelchairs. They hired me dyslexic😊 Meta-knowledge: Metaphysics: gnosis

The Way to summarize this religion is "trought the use of magical powers you can go around the law of identity in order that you can revert the law of causality and bring a utopia on earth" the confusion comes in identifing the exact methodology for wich there are 3 the fabians(mechanistic), the marxists(morality) , and the marcusian(both but negative thinking becomes positive)

👍🏻

Are “Critical Race Theory” books in room with us now, James?

OK I’m really trying to understand this dialectic stuff. Would an example be public education system, free market education system = student voucher system? I would appreciate an answer from anyone.

That is the thing about intellectuals, they think and therefore it is. And they can think of all sorts of awful shit.

5:50 It seems like a key misinterpretation to take 'consider' opposite theories, which makes sense, and change it to 'combine' opposite theories, which does not. It certainly explains a lot about the nonsense they consider (combine with?) logic in present day.

25:30

There still is a lot of what has been called "level confusion." Confusing the spiritual and divine nature of humans with the materialistic view of humans. Philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Hegel, and Kant were speaking of the divine nature of mankind, and their writings can only be understood in that spiritual sense. Ironic that precisely the Communist did not believe in the existence of God and took it all in a material sense. Thus they interpreted the inner unconscious spiritual urge that the divine spirits that we are are due their spiritual recognition from us as meaning that the workers deserved the recognition for their work financially. And that by identifying ourselves and each other as merely material beings we are suppressing the divine sprits we are, was interpreted as certain humans being suppressed victims that should be freed.

Question: So would it be fair to state the following concepts are rooted in the dialectic: Ibram Kendi's definition of anti-racism, which most people would understand as racism - calling racism "anti-racism." Labeling the least tyrannical, least patriarchal large scale civilization ( the West), the "tyrannical white male patriarchy." Combining male and female, to get "gender neutral. Is it fair to conceptualize these examples as engaging the dialectical process: pitting thesis against anti-thesis?

"If I want to be more free I need to give up my freedoms" is not a good way to understand dialectics, but it's a great way to get people who don't know any better to think it's dumb. If you've ever argued with someone, and you realize that you're both kind of right and both kind of wrong, you've done dialectics. It's actually how most thinking is done today, 18th century "formal logic" doesn't stack up in comparison. but go off.

So, is temperature a dialectic synthesis of hot and cold? Was Frederick Nietzsche using the dialectic in beyond good and evil? Am I a leftist when I mix yellow and blue to create green? Was the oracle of Delphi a leftist when she suggested moderation in all things? I'm really confused now.

Good work James. Garbage plus opposing garbage is still garbage not reason. As was said, Dialectic is synthetic not organic but ‘if it is not organic it is not going to work’.

Bill Clinton: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is,"

Great half-hour on Hegelian dialectic. Because I'm now writing on Hegel's phenomenology of Spirit, I've watched about a dozen RU-vid videos on the subject, and yours is easily the best. But I wonder if you are selling Hegelian dialect short because it is synthetic, rather than organic. You have a degree in physics, and it seems to me that Ohm's Law, for instance, is dialectic used to explain electricity, with voltage the thesis, ohms the antithesis, and amperage the thesis. Explaining electricity from the integration of three separate principle is synthetic, but it can't be properly understood and explained otherwise. Another example of a useful (non-leftist) dialectic is the Holy Trinity (Trikaya in Buddhism). I contend that the spiritual en-Light-enment project, which I write on, cannot be properly explicated and elaborated sans a dialectical trinitarian paradigm.

Everyone can claim to be a woman unless you’re an actual biological Real woman, that is 😂

+

Don’t demonize the dialectic. It’s not a problem in and of itself. It’s how we make sense of the world in many ways. Demonize the misuse of the dialectic. Same thing with religion. Lots of good in religion but people abuse and misuse it to their own advantage or cause harm to others.

Undoubtedly there are people who think and talk like this. But it ain’t Hegel.

Redefining Truth is utter confusion.

I would have liked to hear some focus on the role of dialectics in fabricating antagonism - a foundation upon which so much of modern leftist dogma is based. There's a lot more observable evidence of the religious nature of this whole thing when you unravel it this way.

Hmmmmmmm... but here James says that "leftist" means "moving away from the status quo"? I disagree. If the status quo is tons of government control over the economy, and you want to move away from government control over the economy, that doesn't make you a leftist - it makes you either a conservative or libertarian capitalist.

I've watched 4 hours of you talk about the dialectic, and I am still not really clear. Cut to the F'ing chase. Thanks

This seems to me a straw-man of the dialectic concept. we can utilize quantum physics in nuclear science, mris, and cryptography as a result of scientists synthisizing the apperently contradictory ideas of a particle and a wave into a quantafiable function. This is a dialectic concept at work. Another simple example could be if we get a snow/frost in the summer, there is the over arching truth of the procession of the seasons ( year over year summer yielding warm temps reliably) contrast this with the truth that the earth does yield circumstances that can create freezing temps without regard for the first truth(ei closer to poles,volcanic ash shadows, shifting ocean currents, winds ect.) we necassarily synthesize these truths when making predictions in agriculture and event planning, and we base our subsequent actions on the probabilities derived from observing the contrast between them. Furthermore the assertion at the beginning of dialectics begins with ideas rousseau and hegel is patently false, dialectics has been thoughtfully utilized since plato and aristotles time. Importantly: We cannot ascribe something as essential as dialectics souly to the leftist ideology while ignoring the presence of it within the right wing's rhetoric. This video bases the definition of dialectics off of the leftist Marcuse essay the "one dimensional man", which postulates two aspects of industrial economies: -the one dimsionals- ei// those who dont consider histories relevance to their circumstances, giving way to media, consumerism etc. - the dialectics ei// those who consider the multiplicity of factors that shaped our circumstance, allows them to change cultural modes This work is heavily criticized for being adhering to the idealism of marxist class identities. My take is: that while detractors of this work rightly highlight this fatal limitation, they fail to undermine the basic utility of dialectics itself. Dialectic literacy has a place in philosophy no doubt because it enhances ones ability to determine and articulate what is actually happening in society. Though there certainly are cases of it being confusing and especially when undermining objectivisms assumptions, however I maintain that by considering the multiplicity of factors and contrasting their effects involved in our circumstance; we will certainly come up with; not a perfect truth but a more complete understanding of what is. I ask now; had we omitted these factors and variables, can we honestly say we have presented an impartial basis for our assertion(s) of what is? I categorically reject the idea that dialectic is only a leftist phenom and provide the example of writer Thomas Sowells characterization of an unconstrained worldview being leftist and a constrained worldview being right wing. This explanation uses dialectical simplification to outline the contrast between ideologies and provides a more complete; yet not perfect picture of our political spectrums proclivities. This is only one example and his work is referenced to by many modern conservatives. In essence respect is due for the dialectic as a tool for understanding the chaotic world in which we exist, the accusations of it being helpful or hindering will best be taken on a case by case basis, finally let it be known that it may be employed by ANYONE coherent enough: no matter their politics.

Say no to wizards.

Wow dialectical thinking doesn’t take into account actually physical reality.