Dialectics Quotes

“One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“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.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky

“Glory to the logos, my friends! Long live dialectics! Let the party begin! May the verb be with you!”
― Laurent Binet, The 7th Function of Language

“When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth, which is that we are all navigating difficult conditions the best we can, and we all have a lot to learn and unlearn.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“The individual becomes for himself what he is in himself through what he manifests for others.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky

“The usual duty of the "intellectual" is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Logic is also the theory of knowledge of Marxism, but for quite another reason, because the forms themselves of the activity of the ‘spirit’ – the categories and schemas of logic – are inferred from investigation of the history of humanity’s knowledge and practice, i.e. from the process in the course of which thinking man (or rather humanity) cognises and transforms the material world. From that standpoint logic also cannot be anything else than a theory explaining the universal schemas of the development of knowledge and of the material world by social man.”
― Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic

“Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Down with dialectics!”
― Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.”
― Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“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.”
― Thomas Stark, The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes

“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.”
― Tim Hetherington, Tim Hetherington: Infidel

“The life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying . . . jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them.”
― T.S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley

“The entirety of Marxism from top to bottom was established by means of the dialectical materialist method. In literally any work of Marx and Engels it is therefore both possible and necessary to study the logic of their thinking and the theory of knowledge which they consciously employed – dialectics. This must be studied not only in their writings, but in the real logic of the political struggle which they conducted throughout their entire lives. For dialectics is the logic not only of research, and not only of the unity of scientific works; it is also a logic of real causes which comes to life and enters into battle, finding realisation in whatever are the truly real causes changing the face of the surrounding world.”
― Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov

“When questions arise of possible harmful effects of pesticides, the defenders of the products always try to narrow the scope of the inquiry to their most immediate, direct and measurable consequences and then downplay them, The critics of pesticides, on the other hand, urge that the ecosystem is strongly interconnected, highly variable and vulnerable. Thus debates around environmental impact become debates on the philosophy of nature: are things readily isolated or richly interacting? Is the average behavior of chemicals and organisms an adequate basis for decision making or must we be concerned with the unevenness of the world? Shall we "be realists" and stick to measurable costs and benefits, or shall we concern ourselves with all kinds of consequences of what we do? Gradually we see a confrontation of the world views of mechanistic reductionism and of dialectical materialism.”
― Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist

“It was plausible to vote for Trump if you saw him as the demented Discordian Pope of Chaos, the clown prince whose incompetence and recklessness would bring about the complete destruction of the current paradigm, and its replacement by something much better – Meritocracy. There is no other excuse. He is the stupid man’s candidate.”
― Ranty McRanterson, Planet Stupid: How Earth Got Dumber and Dumber

“Join our movement, our dialectical adventure, our mission to release humanity’s hidden potential. Make your own unique dialectical contribution. It’s time for the renaissance of the human race. We want to illuminate the cosmos with the light of humanity’s glittering, glinting, shimmering sparks of every conceivable bright colour. We are marching towards perfection. Reject the past. Reject the Old World Order, the old religions, the old politics, the old rules of society. It’s time to begin again. Now, finally, we understand the way forward – as a dialectical progression towards the Omega Point of Omega Humanity. The time has come to revalue all values.”
― Michael Faust, The Meritocracy Party

“There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man.”
― Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis

“Nigde se, međutim, neprijateljstvo angloameričke tradicije prema dijalektičkoj ne iskazuje tako jasno kao u široko rasprostranjenom gledištu da je stil tih dela mračan i težak, nesvarljiv, apstraktan - ili, da sumiramo to u prikladnoj krilatici, germanski. Može se dopustiti da on nije u skladu sa kanonima jasnog i tečnog novinarskog pisanja kakvi se uče u našim školama. No šta ako ti ideali jasnoće i jednostavnosti služe u kontekstu naše sadašnjice sasvim drukčijoj ideološkoj svrsi od one koju je Dekart imao na umu? Šta ako su oni, u ovo naše doba hiperreprodukcije štampanih stvari i poplave metoda brzog čitanja, namenjeni tome da navedu čitaoca da brzo pređe preko rečenice, pozdravljajući u prolazu, bez napora, unapred spremljenu ideju, a da pritom i ne sluti da stvarna misao zahteva silazak u materijalnost jezika i saglasnost oblika rečenice sa samim vremenom?”
― Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

“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.”
― Cyril Smith

“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.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity

“It must be remembered that in studying the vast literature of nineteenth-century political economy, Marx enjoyed one enormous advantage over his contemporaries. He came to the study of political economy having already worked over and mastered the highest achievements of classical German philosophy, and in particular the achievements of Hegel.”
― Geoffrey Pilling, Marx's Capital: Philosophy and political economy

“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.”
― Thomas Stark, The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes

“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”
― Thomas Stark, The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes

“Living mathematics can and does explain EVERYTHING. There is no need to appeal to anything else. There is no need for a Creator, a first cause, an external energy source or anything else. Everything this object needs is contained within it. It has infinite energy, will endure forever, and will forever be seeking states of higher complexity (greater power). It is always seeking to be all-powerful and allknowing – to BECOME GOD! That is its innermost nature. Our universe is God evolving mathematically from pure potential to pure actualisation. And all of us have exactly the same opportunity. As above, so below.”
― Mike Hockney, Hyperreality

“We thus have three levels of antagonism: the Two are never two, the One is never one, the Nothing is never nothing. Sinthome—the signifier of the barred Other—registers the antagonism of the Two, their non-relationship. The object a registers the antagonism of the One, its inability to be one. $ registers the antagonism of Nothing, its inability to be the Void at peace with itself, to annul all struggles. The position of Wisdom is that the Void brings ultimate peace, a state in which all differences are obliterated; the position of dialectical materialism is that there is no peace even in the Void.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism