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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

It’s dialectical thinking and phrasing, described in its most basic state in the modern era by Fichte (commonly credited to Hegel).

Disciplining oneself to reject all dialectic (harder than it sounds) can go a long way to freeing oneself from a wide variety of crafted narratives.

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I think about the introduction of How to be an anti-racist that explicitly sets up a racist/anti-racist dialectic and effectively defines "racism" as "anti-blackism"

In any of these examples, it effectively creates a closed-loop definition, cutting off all external references or bases, where the definition of the dialectical terms is set by whomever happens to hold the most power and influence in the topic at hand.

Yes, because whoever controls the meaning of words wins: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-little-game-theory-on-discur...

I'm not sure if anybody wins in this case.

Which is the core of why these power games are so dumb yet dangerous.

Divisive narrative battles seem to spiral out in a vicious cycle until a group splits into tribes/echo chambers. The large battles continue until one side is conquered (materially - via financial or physical means). And even if a side wins, it is now suspect to splintering and the process starts all over again.

I imagine this pattern is very old and it's only now on these rapid time scales enabled by the internet are we able to clearly recognize and discuss it more broadly.

Any resources on rejecting dialectic?

Vimalakirti sutra

EDIT: for something more recent: Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

Anything a bit more recent?

Like, Marx-recent?

Marx is the opposite of the kind of reference you want if you want to reject dialectical thinking. That was Marx's whole deal.

Ah.

What I wanted to say was:

I know a bunch of people who argument from Marx perspective of dialectical thinking.

But the comment I replied to gave me the impression, dialectical thinking was fundamentally flawed.

So, I was interested where this flaw lies and how it might proof Marx wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31479769

Another work that is more formal is Maximus’s Ambigua, written largely in response to Origen’s Neoplatonism. Origen was rather fixated on the idea of either precarnate good vs. fallen flesh (those are your two options, another version of Gnosticism basically).

Maximus offers the solution of transcending simple dialectics because free will allows one to choose from more than one good.

In general, discomfort with ambiguity and free will reveals a lot about a person, society, organization, etc.

René Girard, in "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning," effectively (in my opinion) mapped out how dialectical narratives underpin the process of scapegoating victims in a society for sacrifice / purging via revolutionary violence. There is a deep connection between dialectics and their basis in accusatory networks.

If you mean "against dialectic" (havent read TFA yet), a famous case was made by Karl Popper:

https://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/popper_what-is-dialect...

Michel Foucault

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