29 Quotes About Dialectics

Don't that make your bosom plim?

We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as another for myself.

The individual becomes for himself what he is in himself through what he manifests for others.

The challenge lies in escaping the triangle of social democracy, anarchism, and Leninism, and moving on to something “higher” (read, other) rather than declaring two of them dead and idolizing the third.

My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach—and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience.

It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another.

We need a road of trials, a succession of ordeals, to provide the resistance we must overcome in order to become moral (rational), which is to say intelligent. If we met no resistance, there would be no need for us to evolve. For a system to evolve into God, it needs the maximum possible resistance – it needs the Devil. The “world” is Satanic in order that we must become God to overcome it.

Philosophy shows that the Idea advances to an infinite antithesis; that, viz. between the Idea in its free, universal form in which it exists for itself and the contrasted form of abstract introversion, reflection on itself, which is formal existence−for−self, personality, formal freedom, such as belongs to Spirit only.

The universe is driven by a very simple force – symmetry. The universe goes from perfect symmetry to broken symmetry and back to perfect symmetry again. It does this forever. We can put it in other terms: God becomes non-God (alienated from God) and then God again, following an immense, cosmic dialectical process through which he becomes conscious of who and what he is. We are all agents of God’s rediscovery. We are all becoming God.