Dialectic (Part 2)

Dialectic (Part 2)—The post I wrote a couple of days ago about students engaging in activism (student-in-the-making) is also about the dialectic. Through participation in any action (Roth studied workers in a salmon cannery and commercial pilots, for example) you both change the situation/environment and are changed by it simultaneously. “The very nature of practice is its own transformation” (Roth, 2016, p.106) and “being and becoming are dual aspects of nature” (Beatty, 2009). Roth’s “dialectical materialism” is based on the writings of Marx and Engels. It’s all a little beyond my comprehension but my understanding of “materialism” is that there is real world outside of our minds–matter/material–and it is knowable (in principle). It is there, even if we don’t perceive it. If that tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one is around to hear it? Yes. This “realism” is in contrast with the “idealism” philosophy which posits that what we think of as reality is created in the mind and nothing is really real because all people experience the world differently. Dialectical materialism, then, (in my limited understanding) is the idea that the everything is connected in the material of existence. We are all connected to the natural world and our actions act on the world, and the world acts on us. Our thoughts are included. Even our thoughts are created and transferred in our material brains and perhaps also in all parts of our body (and maybe even the metaphysical body as well…but that’s beyond our talk today!). This also includes the ideas of interconnectedness of systems and the need to study all parts of system to understand what is happening. We must view “change as interaction among components of complete systems, and [see] the components themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products and inputs to the system” (Gould, 1990). The whole “system” is the minimal unit of study, because if you take out even one part or change even one part of the system, it affects all other parts. And, now, we have arrived at “activity theory”! #100LSreflections #100dayproject 11/100

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