This is about dialectic in Plato’s Republic and today. There’s a lot here, and in another post I may investigate why that is; meanwhile, I note words of Serge Lang (1927–2005) in the Foreward of Algebra (third edition, 1993):
Unfortunately, a book must be projected in a totally ordered way on the page axis, but that’s not the way mathematics “is”, so readers have to make choices how to reset certain topics in parallel for themselves, rather than in succession.
From socialism to liberalism and perhaps back
The word “dialectic” has the air of a technical term. It intimidated me in the eighth grade, when I chose communism as my topic for a paper in political geography, and I found myself consulting a big book on dialectical materialism. My main source ended up being the Communist Manifesto, which says nothing of dialectic as such.
The Manifesto may take up dialectic implicitly, as by saying in the beginning,
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Perhaps one would refer to the ongoing fight between oppressor and oppressed as dialectical. However, dialogue being conversation, I take dialectic to be the art of conversing; fighting is something else.
Saturday, April 16, 2022
Muvezzi Caddesi, Serencebey, Beşiktaş, İstanbul
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