i’ve tried reading on it but they’re all too dense and complicated.
This seems close enough to my understanding of dialectics, but it's such a vast field of thought that I'm sure we could find differences in our conceptions if we dug deep enough lol (which is, funnily enough, why putting ideas into practice is so important- it offers more concrete opportunities to find differences in lines of thinking). I'll just tag on to add some readings that I've found to be important to my understanding of dialectics:
Marx and Engels' The German Ideology, specifically the first part on Ludwig Feuerbach. I'd recommend skimming the Wikipedia on Feuerbach before reading, just to get a better sense of what Marx and Engels are responding to. You might also find their Theses on Feuerbach useful as a primer, since it's pretty much just the outline for this piece. I'd also say that Mao's On Practice and On Contradiction are a couple of pieces that I find more accessible than Marx and Engels, while simultaneously deepening my understanding of their works.
Inside of you there are two wolves: one is gay, the other is straight - You are bi.
My baby brained understanding is something like "troubleshooting".
Something that should be working seems to be broken or working against itself, these are the contradictions.
So you work through the contradictions to either identify things that need to be fixed to make the system run like it should (and/or to give ammunition in arguments about why the particular system needs to be done away with).
The most simplistic explanation I've ever heard is that you start with a thesis that explains some phenomenon. Then, an antithesis arises which disproves your thesis (like an exception to the rule) - this is the contradiction, the thesis and antithesis are now in conflict. Thesis and antithesis struggle against each other (or, you argue and work with someone of an opposing opinion) until a new explanation is created called the synthesis which grows out of the thesis but takes into account the antithesis. The synthesis acts as the new thesis now and necessarily contains its own contradiction, and it will further progress into a new synthesis once it comes into contact with its antithesis.
I've also seen the thesis-antithesis-synthesis trio also termed A-not A-B or the abstract-negative-concrete. Also I think the whole thesis-antithesis-synthesis explanation is a bit inadequate if you are really trying to understand dialectics. But for just a simple, general explanation that can help you to generally understand people when they mention it, thesis-antithesis-synthesis I believe is okay.
For the Marxist context, which I assume is why you are asking, Marx applied dialectics to the material world, economic systems resolving themselves into higher economic systems (slave-based->feudalism->capitalism) through the class struggle (the contradiction). Like, in capitalism, the bourgeoisie (the thesis) cannot exist without the proletariat (the antithesis). And so the capitalist system relies on a proletarian class, yet the proletarian class will eventually cause the destruction of capitalism (the thesis creates its own antithesis). So there is a contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat (class struggle) and it will resolve itself into socialism.
Thats a really vulgar explanation of dialectical materialism but I believe it will get you by
There are two ways of seeing a landscape. One is as a narrative or collection of them. That might be mythology or some social/economic story we use to justify what we see and how one individual interacts with others. Because this view is built out of an idealistic framework, self-imposed ideas on nature and its mechanics, your understanding of that landscape is partial. You can say that the animal spirits explain their nature but that's you giving mythical qualities to animals and building a fiction out of that nice idea. You can create ethical and moral ideas about the things in that landscape, the sacred plants and the important animals and the limits of human interaction with them, but that's a very one dimensional understanding of the landscape based on your own use-value and cultural narratives. I would say this is bad because it creates narrow, insular definitions of the world that can't easily incorporate new information contradicting the falsehoods in the mythical worldviews they've built. Your relationship to that landscape is different from any other group's and the narrative you understand it through only has personal value.
The other way is as an ecologist. You start from a place of unbiased observation. You try to fully understand the individuals in that landscape, synthesising that knowledge from as many other observation-based angles as possible. Then you understand that individual through its relationships. It exists interdependently with other members of its species, the bull-doe dialectic which describes how an elk herd functions. It exists with other animals, the elk-wolf dialectic that challenges us to understand what a herbivore is and what a carnivore is and how those two interact as opposed to the tick-elk parasitic relationship. It has a dialectical relationship with plants, with their lifecycles dependent on the seed propagation of elk feeding and nitrogen fixation of their faeces while the elk is dependent on a diverse set of flora the landscape provides throughout the year. We can understand the dialectical relationship between weather and climate or between climate and plants to learn what that feeding schedule will look like under different conditions. There's a dialectical relationship with water as the herd migrates with rivers and snow, a full understanding of the elk dependent on a full understanding of how it supplies its physiological needs and what it contributes back to the system providing them.
At the end of the day, when you've tried to understand as much as possible about the true nature of the elk and the true nature of everything it interacts with, the worldview you're left with is very different from one based on idealism. They have partial understandings with the blanks filled in, you have something that you can take to a biologist in India or a hydrologist in the Netherlands or a geologist in Madagascar. When you do, it synthesises with their understandings of ecosystems and whatever untruths persist are falsifiable. You have a structural, universalised understanding of the landscape which allows you to affect it at any level of its existence. You can view everything in miniature and understand the material and social underpinnings of its mechanics. You can understand how changes over time in dialectical relationships affect that landscape. The depopulation of wolves changes the predator-prey dialectic and the behaviours of elk, impacting the entire framework in a way that you can explain in agnostic mechanical terms.
For Marx, apply that understanding of an ecosystem to society and its historical iterations. You exist as Winterchillie in some abstract way, but not as a brain in a vacuum. You're the culmination of your lived experiences and the interactions with things outside of your brain. You exist in the parent-child and student-school dialectics, the landlord-tenant or the homeowner-bank dialectic, in the employee-boss dialectic, in the gender-gender dialectics, in racial and national dialectics with other groups, as the suburbanite now inserting yourself into the mountain ecosystem and creating a dialectical relationship with the elk and bears. We can study these relationships and what they represent in terms of material and social structures. We can examine how your landlord-tenant relationship differs from a lord-serf relationship through the conditions that it existed in. We can build a macro understanding of society where the truths of these relationships are divorced from the social narratives justifying them, then adjust or end those relationships to produce different outcomes.
Listen to this: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics
Am I dumb? It feels like he didn't really explain at all how dialectics work
bro u just did. 1 try theory, 2. they dense -> 12: complain online
The most super ultra simplified definition that is totally bastardizing it but that I can think of is that it's the process of taking to contrasting views (contradictions) and out of that you form a "synthesis" of the two. Once you get that part its a bit easier to grasp the more dense explanations.
