29 Quotes About Dialectics

... all that is finite is such that cancels itself, is transmuted into its opposite. This transition is effected with the aid of the nature inherent in every phenomenon, which contains forces that engender its opposite.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

Marx's simultaneous critique of the categories of political economy, of utopian socialism and of Hegel does not aim to replace them with an improved set. He grasps them as expressions of the way that humanity is concealed within inhumanity. By tracing their logical interconnections, he finds the way to break their stranglehold on our consciousness and on our lives.

Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.

Extinction has long since become a part of our lives.

We are all part of a God factory. Gods are what come off the production line at the end of an eons-long, protracted, dialectical process designed to overcome every possible obstacle, trial, setback, difficulty and ordeal. You need to be a God to survive the dialectic. It takes you to hell and forces you to confront the Devil. The Devil is you. The Devil is your Shadow. Only Devils can become Gods. That is the law of the dialectic.

Roots matter by not even one jot, and though there are lessons we can draw from them, we cannot let them determine us or even define us, just define and frame how it is we are to escape ourselves to remake ourselves. We are not prisoners of the past. We can all reinvent ourselves, build ourselves anew. We are a New Humanity, a Higher Humanity, the Bright Humanity of the future

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.