![]() ![]() But is all this really possible? And why is it needed? In responding to these questions, I will only be concerned with Marx's dialectic, which I take to be the fullest and most successful version of this approach. This would put us in a position to grasp even our biggest problems in their full complexity-and greatly improve our chances of solving them-but also to see how the interaction of all these parts creates the whole to which they belong, which, at the same time, helps to shape these very parts. If most attempts to find solutions for them remain so partial, it is not just that the problems are so difficult (which they are), but that the full problem, the bigger picture, is never seen, and with this approach cannot be seen.ĭialectics? Dialectics is a way of thinking about the relations and processes in the world, and a method for studying them, which enables us-unlike the struggling soldiers in the story of Humpty Dumpty-to put the whole with which we are concerned, knowledge, back together again. How different is this from the experience we all had when we entered university and discovered that those who came before had broken up knowledge into a growing number of disciplines, sub-disciplines, programs, and schools of thought, with the result that every important problem arrived on our desk already cut up into dozens of ill-fitting pieces. Every child knows the story of Humpty Dumpty who fell off a wall and broke into so many pieces that all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |