I think there is a mistake people make (those both for and against dialectics applying to nature and non-social sciences), where they expect nature to “follow” dialectical schema, as if a molecule had to open a tiny book of communist theory to know when to dissociate. I think this understanding of dialectics comes from a long history of using scientific phenomena as examples when explaining common tools of dialectical thinking. It’s a little crude.
Rather, dialectics is about how to think better, without reifying or being one-sided. There is no reason it shouldn’t apply to everything we can think about. To claim that dialectics apply to science means that using dialectics gives us a better understanding than a “metaphysical” view (or whatever you want to call the opposite of a dialectical view), and from personal experience I very much believe it does.
This is a great point. I think when people start their journey into Marxism, they imagine dialectical materialism as prescriptive and then look towards revolutionary figures to tell them what to do. They miss the entire point that it is a way of thinking and analyzing. What we can learn from revolutionaries of the past is how they gathered and analyzed data to figure out what they could do to change their societies. It is all about observing things and studying how they really exist and then based on that, how change is inevitably going to happen and how you can interact with things to change them faster and in the direction you want the change to end up.
I think there is a mistake people make (those both for and against dialectics applying to nature and non-social sciences), where they expect nature to “follow” dialectical schema, as if a molecule had to open a tiny book of communist theory to know when to dissociate. I think this understanding of dialectics comes from a long history of using scientific phenomena as examples when explaining common tools of dialectical thinking. It’s a little crude.
Rather, dialectics is about how to think better, without reifying or being one-sided. There is no reason it shouldn’t apply to everything we can think about. To claim that dialectics apply to science means that using dialectics gives us a better understanding than a “metaphysical” view (or whatever you want to call the opposite of a dialectical view), and from personal experience I very much believe it does.
This is a great point. I think when people start their journey into Marxism, they imagine dialectical materialism as prescriptive and then look towards revolutionary figures to tell them what to do. They miss the entire point that it is a way of thinking and analyzing. What we can learn from revolutionaries of the past is how they gathered and analyzed data to figure out what they could do to change their societies. It is all about observing things and studying how they really exist and then based on that, how change is inevitably going to happen and how you can interact with things to change them faster and in the direction you want the change to end up.