If you involve yourself with radical politics on a theoretical level in any way, then you'll encounter dialectical thinking as surely as you'd encounter objectivism when surrounded by pimply American first-year economists. It forms a philosophical and conceptual background to more radical political writing than any comparable system, but is there actually anything of value to be found in the dialectical method any more?
Granted in Marx's day there were elements of Hegel's dialectic that ran against the grain of contemporary scholarship, like questions of identity and difference, an emphasis on perpective as being epistemically relevant, an emphasis on relations rather than things, and an understanding that quantity and quality aren't always discrete attributes of objects that are in a state of change. However, it seems to me that all of these have now been incorporated into the postmodern mindset through things like structuralism, relativity and systems theory/cybernetics, and that the emacipatory conceptual aspect of dialectical thinking has been lost in a morass of obscurantist philosophical jargon that hides rather than elucidating facts about the world.
My other principle reservation concerns the inauspicious philosophical background to dialectical thinking. Fichte's idea that consciousness wasn't grounded in anything outside itself (the dubious foundation of German Idealism) becomes yet more implausible with Hegel's insistence that only 'absolute' consciousness, rather than any individual consciousness could provide sufficient ground for experience. As Kierkegaard said "Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all."
So my challenge to you is this: show me something dredged from the murky logical depths of this dismal science that demonstrates that its actually worth keeping, some solitary nugget of insight that actually relies on dialectical thinking in this day an age, some reason, in short, to bother with this shit at all. A lot of writers that I respect (two of whom are quoted in the poll) would describe themselves as dialecticians, so whilst I might find some of the methods employed logically repugnant, I do honestly have an open mind on the subject.
Convince me!
Granted in Marx's day there were elements of Hegel's dialectic that ran against the grain of contemporary scholarship, like questions of identity and difference, an emphasis on perpective as being epistemically relevant, an emphasis on relations rather than things, and an understanding that quantity and quality aren't always discrete attributes of objects that are in a state of change. However, it seems to me that all of these have now been incorporated into the postmodern mindset through things like structuralism, relativity and systems theory/cybernetics, and that the emacipatory conceptual aspect of dialectical thinking has been lost in a morass of obscurantist philosophical jargon that hides rather than elucidating facts about the world.
My other principle reservation concerns the inauspicious philosophical background to dialectical thinking. Fichte's idea that consciousness wasn't grounded in anything outside itself (the dubious foundation of German Idealism) becomes yet more implausible with Hegel's insistence that only 'absolute' consciousness, rather than any individual consciousness could provide sufficient ground for experience. As Kierkegaard said "Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all."
So my challenge to you is this: show me something dredged from the murky logical depths of this dismal science that demonstrates that its actually worth keeping, some solitary nugget of insight that actually relies on dialectical thinking in this day an age, some reason, in short, to bother with this shit at all. A lot of writers that I respect (two of whom are quoted in the poll) would describe themselves as dialecticians, so whilst I might find some of the methods employed logically repugnant, I do honestly have an open mind on the subject.
Convince me!