Dialectics

This must become fully incorporated into this blog...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

I disagree with the analysis in this page but it is a start. For example presupposition and statement themselves form a dialectic - one cannot have a statement without a presupposition and vice versa. So the very "nature" of dialectics is dialectical and does not lend itself to fixed unilateral definitions where a single position that is "true" can ever be presented.

Anyway to present dialectics as it stands for me at this moment I was considering the notion of sexuality. Classically this is a dialectic between male and female. Now we may consider that a Man has a sexuality and a Woman has a sexuality - somehow embedded in their material bodies. After all what is there to a Man and a Woman than there bodies so the sexuality must be "in" the body. So we have the scientists looking for genes and chemistry upon which to found the notion of sex. But maybe it isn't a "stuff" at all!

If aliens took a Man off to their planet and paraded him around in a circus or a zoo as a specimen of an alien would they ever have reason to think of him as sexual? They may find the penis and wonder what it does - this they may agree is for excretion. So they find the genitals and the haploid sperm inside - but they don't seem to do anything. Maybe they see the man masturbate and orgasm. If we presuppose that they know what enjoyment is they may decide the function is enjoyment - this is what many humans think! Yet if they think evolutionarily it will be hard to see how it evolved.

Maybe they can work out that man is mortal and must have some way of replicating. They may spend a long time trying to get sperms to fuse to make diploid cells. They may work out that maybe two men are needed since gene mixing would be beneficial. Maybe eventually some alien scientific genius will propose that they are missing something that maybe sperms are only one type of gamete and there is another type.

They still don't have a concept of sexuality though they are deducing that one must exist. In their minds still Man is just Man - his "maleness" doesn't exist yet because all Men are the same.

When finally they provide a female she may be considered a new type of creature with clear physical differences. However very quickly they will realise that Man and Woman are actually versions of the same thing and their difference is sexuality. Now the concept has been born and Man becomes male and Woman becomes female.

Thus while Man and Woman form a single species, it is a fractured unity because Man and Woman are also not the same. They are in this particular case distinct in sexuality. Yet they are not completely distinct because a Man cannot be a "male" without Woman and vice versas. Thus when we think of "maleness" it is actually pointless to picture a "man" because nothing is indicating what is "maleness" is. It would be just a meaningful to picture a "woman"! For a complete answer we need to picture both a Man and a Woman and "maleness" becomes one half of the picture. This way we recognise that "maleness" depends upon "femaleness" and vice versa in a unity which is at the same time a duality.

This exact idea is more commonly seen for the concepts of "black" and "white" and famously pictured in Daoism as the Yin-Yang symbol (which is also the male-female symbol). This is what I mean by dialectics. Not just the existence of an underlying presupposition and unity which has a dual expression but the deeper realistion that even that duality between unity and duality is a further dialectic. The Unity needs the Dualism. The One needs the Many and both exist as sides of the same coin at the same time as both One and Many. Until this position is reached then dialectics is an endless and eternally twisting vortex of disputes. We may think that we know more than we did in 1800 and that by 2200 we will finally have the Truth : the dialectical engine will have processed all existence and we will inherit full knowledge of reality and the underlying reality. Yet by 2200 the world will have changed and we will no longer be pursuing the Post-Modern realities of today. The dialectical engine will be arguing in new territories. Plato never thought to answer his questions with brain imagingp; we will never have thought to answer our questions with whatever new fad has evolved by 2200. The end of Reasoning can only occur when division and unity have been seen to be so mutually dependent as to be seen the same. My sister studies Peace and Conflict Studies at the moment. Isn't the clue in that oxymoron - how can you study opposites? The reason is that to have Conflict one must have the possibility of Peace, and to have Peace one must have the possibility of Conflict. What they search for in this particular area of investigation is actually the removal of Peace & Conflict together. However since it is bound into economics and people make a living from this process this cannot happen. Like with charities, politics, health-care etc the infection of the raison d'etre with economic logic means that solutions can and must never be found. The dialectic as with Virus Software and Virus writers as another example must be maintained to create a fixed status-quo. Mundane Society MS (a term I will now use for the base notion of people living together by enforced laws - as opposed to Elevated Society ES which is the actual dynamics of group-consciousness which subsumes even the rulers and the rule systems): I realise MS actually depends upon the monitoring and maintenance of dialectics to create fixed order. Again we can use the case of Terrorists of Western Power and Western Power itself: two opposing positions have been bound together into a dialectic creating antagonism and the possibility of resolution has been framed within this dialectic as the eradication of one of the sides. In reality there are only sides because of the dialectic between the sides (they need one another) and the process to resolution thus needs both sides equally. A simpler resolution is to deny the dialectic in the first place. If someone punches you I remember a very famous person saying "turn the other cheek": in other words take no offence because there is no dialectic... until you join the battle that is. Heraclitus a big hero of mine was first recorded in what has become Europe to fully propose that everything is in flux: an eternal dance between opposing forces. A book I'm to write called "Alexandria" proposes that the course of world history has been the creation of stable order by supression of this idea and the replacing of it by the Platonic idea of Essence (backed up by the Theory of Forms). Socrates' Trial was a show trial for someone far more dangerous to the Right Wing - read the book when I write it. (Alexandria is a girl btw - and the place - but it aint Sophie's World.) Yet maybe the maintenance is opposing forces is just the ignorant man's way of Living - the Sysyphian struggle to keep the chaos of the world at bay. If Work has a founding concept it is in ignorance of Dialectics - yet to read Do Botton but he made little reference in the talk to a such an elemental nature to Work (there is more in Genesis). Dialectical thinkers point to the absence of work in the world - the Eastern concepts of non-action. The existence of action arises only when we get bound into a dialectic and find ourselves struggling against an "opposite". The world is in eternal change anyway so if we wait all things will come to pass all by themselves as Basho says in that fabulous saying "While sitting doing nothing the Spring comes and the grass grows all by itself." The downside is that what we wish for decays all by itself - ignorance of which I expressed fully regarding "my muse"!!! - but the upside is that what we wish for will oneday arise all by itself. And, more wisely, wishing for these things is like betting on a horse race - without a bet we accept any horse winning - it is only once we have become bound to an outcome dialectically that the tears and joy are created. Dialectical because we create sides and tension between sides by first perceiving there are sides and then taking sides. It is not the horse-race which creates the tears and joy but simply our internal binding to the outcome. Always be in charge when binding to sides of a dialectic - it is when the sides chose us that we suffer! And why do we join the roller-coaster of sides? This has another name Ego. The gambler gambles because on teh one hand they get greedy when they win, and on the other they wish to prove themselves a winner when they lose. Thus they get bound into the dialectic. Taking sides again when they win, and taking sides again when they lose. Even after the Casino is closed the gambler will find sides upon which to bet: which bus will come first, who will win the election, will I get through that red light etc etc. There are sides everywhere if we look, and there are opportunities to take sides everywhere if we look, and there are opportunities for joy and tears everywhere if we look. Then again we don't have to look.