At Home with John and Debbie

You might have noticed a Soviet Russia theme creeping into some blog entries. This is because of my recent reading habits — Robert Service’s A History of Modern Russia — about which I’ll say more once I’ve finished it.

Along the way, I’ve had to refer to other sources. Mostly, the atlas, but also I’ve had to go off on tangents to find out about events and concepts that are mentioned in the book but beyond its scope.

This is how I realised that I had no idea what dialectic materialism is. In fact, I had no idea what dialectics are.


Wikipedia’s article on Dialectics didn’t help much. It fills your head with contradicting views (quite appropriate as it turns out) and introduces you to a lot of keywords, but it never quite gets to the point. Sometimes when something’s being explained to you, you build up a set of possibilities in your mind, as each statement comes in. You expect the possibilities to collapse into one conclusion by the time the explanation is complete, and that never happened.

I found Dialectics for Kids much more useful. Don’t look at me like that. I read the “for big kids” bit. I still wouldn’t say I’m 100% certain about it, but I think the ghist of it is that Dialectics is a set of concepts for reasoning about things:

• Any situation (”thesis”) has an opposition (”antithesis”) which works towards change
• For example, a stable layer of snow on a mountain, has snow falling on it building up to an unstable arrangement
• The change happens suddenly, leaving us with a new situation (”synthesis”)
• For example, the avalanche when the unstable arrangement of slow collapses
• Often the sequence repeats, but not as an exact action replay. The wheel returns to its original orientation, but the car has moved.

All this talk of cycles reminded me of the Tarot (disclaimer: I do not believe in mumbo-jumbo). Allegedly, the major cards of the Tarot pack tell the story of the Fool’s journey. He begins his journey looking as if he is about to step over the edge of a cliff. 22 cards later, he is poised over the same cliff - “Ending, in a sense, where he began, beginning again at the end.”

I think there is merit in making these kinds of observations — cycles are indeed pretty ubiquitous, as are incremental changes building up to sudden catastrophic change. I think it’s important not to let oneself fall into a trap of seeing everything in these terms — “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

Dialectic materialism? That can wait for another day (although I think the thesis might be the bourgois state, the antithesis might be the efforts of dissatisfied proletariat, and the sudden change might be violent revolution…).

Afterthought: I just realised that in this blog entry I vastly oversimplified and possibly misrepresented a whole area of philosophy that some people dedicate their entire careers to, and then added insult to injury by mildly suggesting that it “has merit”. Ho hum. No offence, like.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 16:06 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.