What is the Dialectic? | Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx | Keyword

hey everyone today i'm going to talk about the dialectic now in in order to give what i think to be a kind of full description of what the dialectic is what it can be i think it's important to cover a few different philosophers so i'm going to talk about the dialectic in terms or as it's used by plato kant hegel and marx and i want to do that just so you get the kind of most holistic understanding about what the dialectic is now before jumping into that you can follow me on instagram if you want at theory underscore and underscore philosophy to see mostly pictures of my cats if you want to help me out you can do that by you know liking sharing subscribing i would help a lot leaving five star reviews on any podcast app you might be using or contributing monetarily if you wanted to do that obviously no pressure if you're listening to this in podcast forum you can find the video on youtube or if you're listening to this on youtube you can find it in podcast form where there shouldn't be any ads and i hope to keep it that way because they're annoying so yeah let's jump into this so the dialectic beginning with plato because we're going to move through them chronologically here can be understood very broadly as a verbal engagement between two people which is what the term suggests uh coming from the greek out of um the word daya would emotes the idea revokes the idea of two so two people in this case and lectic i think is electicos but it's not totally relevant which which refers to speech or the kind of act of verbalizing something [Music] so it is a dual engagement between two speakers and this comes out in plato through what many of us would know to be the socratic dialogues so as many of plato's books are framed they happen to take place between two interlocutors two two speakers most often socrates and somebody else and plato sees within people and their capacity to speak a potential to move beyond the sensuous world into what we might just call transcendence and this can happen only when you know two people are engaged in such a way as to elevate language beyond itself and beyond this realm so this often takes the form of socrates asking methodical questions to somebody else in the process this person begins to realize exactly you know where this process is going and then socrates through the use of language and his relative position to another person that he could pick out or um kind of parse through their their own language their own explanations the truth that is imminent that is within all of us with language alone and it is through that that we are able to elevate ourselves to the next plane the you know ideal or transcendent now this relates pretty well with probably how most of us understand the dialectic as being the meeting of a thesis and an antithesis that collide forming a new idea the synthesis which then becomes the new thesis that can then be opposed again and then through that confrontation forms another synthesis that can then be opposed again and so on and so forth so when you have two speakers for for plato what you are seeing is a confrontation that opens up the possibility to the transcendent to this synthesis that moves beyond the limited domain of signs and plato has you know a lot of opinions about how this is reserved pretty specifically for verbal speech and how it isn't opened up with like um like writing which is very clear about but i'm not going to get into that now so that's pretty well how we can think of the dialectic through plato now let's jump a couple thousand years to kant and kant imagine imagine a scene where socrates and let's say thrashi makkus or somebody else uh are engaging in this dialectical discussion and kant is sitting there watching kant would be sitting waiting very patiently for the so-called truth to arrive the moment of transcendence and he'd be waiting and waiting and waiting and it never comes because there's still only two mortals discussing in mortal tongue that is through language they don't seem to actually breach into anything new so kant is like wait what's going what's going on here is there a limit to the dialectic can the dialectic not take us where plato thinks it can and so he kant sets out to prove that dialectical reasoning is limited so in order to do that he takes two arguments that are a that's a thesis and an antithesis that are you know one idea and it's complete opposite to demonstrate that both at a certain point of reasoning are true you know at their you know limit point can both be true one argument goes as follows that time and space are infinite and the reason they are infinite is because if they weren't then that would mean that there was nothing before it and how would it be that there was that time and space that are things that that exist and that give meaning to things in the world in the world in the universe how could it possibly be that time and space exist if they came from nothing because you can't make anything out of nothing so they must be infinite so that's one idea and then contrast that with the antithesis that says time and space are finite and because if time and space were not finite then that would mean there would be an infinite succession of events between any two given points any two given events or between any two given spaces let's say between planets because if it was infinite everything would be infinitely far apart and then therefore you couldn't possibly have life you couldn't have things you couldn't have anything actually galvanize and construct together if it was truly infinite so there must be a kind of border to space and time so kant uses this example to demonstrate that dialectical reasoning can only take us so far it you know just by having two mortal people speak and trying to move beyond the realm of their experience with their language through kind of dialectical engagement they will arrive at an impasse that would demand them to make some giant leap and to say that oh well it's god that solves all these problems for example and he resolves that by uh using what he calls the transcendental dialectic but i'm not going to get into that now if you're interested in that i've done a whole slew of videos on kant if you want that more of a discussion on that but just for now what you want to take from kant is that he sees a limitation to the dialectic he doesn't see a synthesis moving beyond the realm of the sensuous the realm of the perceptible world and now let's move into hegel who is probably the most important figure when it comes to the dialectic so hegel throughout the course of the phenomenology of spirit describes all of these various interactions between people and other people and people and objects and people and ideas that portend or that motivate movement that motivate development and change so the dialectic for hegel is not limited to speech it actually comes up in what he calls sense certainty perception and understanding now i'm not going to get into the what each of those mean right now i've done the entire phenomenology if you want to go check that out in which i explain each of those different kind of points of human interaction but i want to illustrate this in terms of just for now consciousness and self-consciousness so hegel says that if we were if any one of us as let's say a baby was dropped into uh let's say some uninhabited planet and imagine that we could breathe there of course and and that you know we could live like we were being nourished by something and we were to grow up hegel says it seems unlikely by just being among like rocks and sand let's say it looked like mars or something it seemed unlikely that we would develop the capacity for self-consciousness but but why well he says the only way that we can really have self-consciousness is if we are looking upon something else that is itself looking upon us and it is only through that recognition that is i recognize someone else who has the capacity to recognize me that i can suddenly say well does that mean that i'm something that can look upon myself so hegel describes this interaction between an object and a human a sense certainty so we only see a thing in the world and i mean i'm pretty sure the thing's there like my watch is here and i can touch it and it's it's there but it doesn't really motivate anything in me so the dialectical engagement between us is pretty stagnant it doesn't it doesn't move us into anything new rather or i should say by contrast with another human or even like maybe an animal you can see that there is a kind of giving and taking in terms of our interaction where we are just by virtue of being near one another able to grow and this is how we can understand the dialectic in terms of hegel as a meeting between two pretty specifically two conscious capable self-consciousness beings that interact with one another and it is by virtue of that they are able to propel themselves into newness now we must extend this a little further to say that over the course of the phenomenology of spirit hegel is describing all of these different interactions whether it be between you know objects between other self-conscious beings between culture and humans between religion and humans there are always these kinds of conflicts and these conflicts are both the means to arrive at absolute spirit what he calls absolute spirit this kind of recognition of self-consciousness among all people a kind of uh social setting in which all people are recognized as being self-conscious and it is by virtue of them all recognizing their self-consciousness and their being their own individual being that they actually form a whole they form a community out of their being them recognizing their differences their kind of um interest intricacies so we arrive at this point through these perpetual antagonisms through these perpetual conflicts and this extends then to finally for him like um the recognition of a kind of withoutness like with uh in the form of god or religion and there is then this kind of perpetual thesis antithesis synthesis thesis antithesis synthesis over and over and over again and it is decidedly abstract that is he's describing this always occurring between all people between all things like i say that it was kind of reserved for self-consciousnesses engaging with one another but there are dialectical occurrences between me and and a rock when i confront a rock i am confronted with a possibility for newness what can i do with the rock what can the rock do with me almost and that propels us finally into marx so marx is a reader of hegel but he doesn't have much patience for it instead he says god hegel is just so abstract that it doesn't really give us a way to understand the world in terms of material real relations so marx says it's not as though there's this kind of abstract thing called spirit or absolute spirit motivating these movements to arrive at itself or the universe kind of wanting to understand itself through these movements instead marx is like no we can look at the world and see these kinds of conflicts occurring all the time and specifically for him this is class conflict so you have upper classes and lower classes you have serfs and like landowners or feudal lords you have the proletarian and the bourgeois the bourgeoisie that are always in these constant struggles the proletarian and the capitalist or you have the [Music] and anyways all of these different antagonisms and with each antagonism is a movement so we move from having something like slavery into serfdom into wage labor so on and so forth that we can actually trace this process happening by these antagonisms by these dialectical encounters between one real location and another that motivates newness a kind of synthesis of the two bringing us into something new and unlike hegel marx doesn't think that this is going to lead to some kind of abstract absolute spirit or spirit instead it's going to lead to a very real new social and economic dynamic which will be communism for him and this is a necessary step because as these various tensions resolve themselves that is tension between slave owner and slave between serf and and feudal lord you know these very reprehensible systems and then finally between proletarian and capitalist what we are seeing is a very teleological movement one that implies a kind of positivistic movement where things have been getting steadily better now with capitalism what we see is something fundamentally new for marx but this newness is kind of undercut by the very uh maintenance of an encounter between the board between the capitalist and the wage earner who the wage earner that is will grow so dissatisfied with the conditions put forth by capitalism that it will try to usurp it try to usurp the capitalists but how it is different from the previous instances is that capitalism affords the potential for a kind of global solidarity between workers so whereas previously you know you just have kind of a localized uh conflicts between like serfs and feudal lords where you know it's just this one little plot of land and you can only really engage with those people suddenly capitalism provides the conditions or allows for the conditions for all workers to galvanize around this single ideal and so with this is a fundamentally new phenomenon in the dialectical sequence between this antagonism between classes that will synthesize into the total overhaul of the very dialectical relation and will allow for the establishment of a kind of world worker system that is only potentiated by capitalism because it provides the conditions that will undo it that is unlike any previous one and that is brought you know made for by the dialectical movements and that pretty much covers it i mean i hope i gave what i think to be a pretty broad view of the dialectic um so that you i think have the best possible understanding but if i omitted anything or you know there's anything i should have done better said better i would love to hear about it but yeah take care

Channel: Theory & Philosophy

Views: 79,876

Keywords: Dialectic, Plato, Kant, Marx, Hegel

Id: RY_rGJUpwsM

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020