A conversation with Kelly yesterday about terms and their definitions got me thinking about how common academic concepts get taken for granted in the classroom. While I have had an entire class that explained the concepts of ontology, epistemology and methodology, that was a rare occurence. Too often, the professors and instructors assume that we know what a given term or theme is or means.
To whit: dialectic.
Has anyone ever truly explained to you what it means? Independant of using it with Marxian thought?
I realized last night, as I worked through parts of Arendt's Human Condition, that the argument I'm attempting to setup for a long detailed paper on music as mass culture or art requires me to contrast Arendt's work sharply with Adorno's thought. It would seem to me that I'm attempting a dialectical argument.
My understanding of dialectic is the presentation of an argument that has a thesis, an opposing thesis (antithesis?) and a compare/contrast analytical conclusion (synthesis). But is this actually a dialectic?
I'd look downright silly if, in the title of my paper, I grandly proclaimed that I was presenting a dialectical argument, with Arendt on one side, Adorno on the other and my syntehsis of their thoughts with others and my own, if/when, in fact, I am not.
So what does dialectic truly mean anyway? And how am I supposed to know all of these terms and concepts that have cropped up if I've never had the chance to discuss them with someone?
There's my collaborative verbal learning style coming up to bite me again.
Anyway, if you have opinions on the meaning of dialectic, speak up please. My paper is due next wek and I don't want to read as a twit to the professor in question.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
You can have a dialectic with no synthesis.
From my recent presentation on Freitag:
"Freitag’s dialectic, is not the master/slave, thesis/anti-thesis, that we find in Hegel’s teleological history, where the synthesis is a final end point in history. Rather, his dialectic is one that follows the conditions of social reproduction and historical transformation as an ongoing cyclical process. What is rejected is the idea of the fulfillment or the surpassing of the dialectic for the synthesis, and therefore, the goal is not to transform the real, but to discover what lies behind the appearances, and when necessary to liberate these hidden things.
also, a good starting point (as i know you know)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
Post a Comment