Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

On Jun 30, 9:31=A0am, rab <rogeralanblackw...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> It is only by taking a critical attitude to this 'formalising of
> dialectics' that we can develop dialectical materialism today but this
> work doesn't easily fit into the everyday consciousness because in the
> struggle to grasp even works by Hegel the mind tends to 'formalise'
> the content in order to understand the logic espoused. =A0It is
> necessary to suspend 'judgement' for a time and just follow the
> 'argument' in the order that this 'content' may stimulate new thought
> through contradiction. =A0Whilst the work of some of those soviet
> philosophers may be useful in presenting the 'bare bones' of
> dialectical categories and their interconnections it is necessary to
> understand the 'active' side of dialectics and the fact that it
> develops through struggle.
>
There's a reason 9 out of ten times an apst poster invokes a
dialectical law, it is the law of the transformation of quantity into
quality. It is the only law anyone understands.

We have a dialectical law described as the "law of the
interpenetration of opposites." Neither of the two substantive terms
mean much of anything relevant to most people, myself included. Does
anyone have a *straightforward* idea of what interpenetration of
opposites is, like we all do for quantity/quality?

Forget formalization. What is needed is explication, built up from our
current vernacular, rather than continuing to express these concepts
in an archaic Hegelian ideolect. It seems to me that the subjective
experience you describe when you suspend judgment resembles the
mystical more than the scientific.

srd