Comment by hugeBirb
17 days ago
Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
"Not that it matters ...", What? Of course it matters! I only come to HN for extended arguments on the meaning of the Dialectic.
I gave you one in a sibling ;)
Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased:
Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him."
Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?"
Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news."
Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?"
Will: "No, probably not."
(Which is to say: You're entirely right. But we thought the name was funny so we kept it. Sorry for the philosophical inaccuracy)
If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."
One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.
A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
Seth Godin made the case that its more important for people to make remarks than to be favorable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus...)
Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.
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If that's not motivation enough for you to rename it, well, TypeScript already has a static type checker called Hegel. https://hegel.js.org/ (It's a stronger type system than TypeScript.)
We looked at it and given that the repo was archived nearly two years ago decided it wasn't a problem.
I think it's more that Hegel was fine with "dialectics" but that the antithesis/synthesis stuff is not actually what's going on in his dialectic. It's a bit of a popular misconception about the role of negation and "movement" in Hegel.
I believe (unless my memory is broken) they get into this a bunch in Ep 15 of my favourite podcast "What's Left Of Philosophy": https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/15-what-is-dialectics-...
Also if you're not being complained about on HN, are you even really nerd-ing?
From what I understand, it's a proof technique (other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt) that requires generating new conceptual thoughts via internal contradiction and showing necessarily that you lead from one category to the next.
The necessity thing is the big thing - why unfold in this way and not some other way. Because the premises in which you set up your argument can lead to extreme distortions, even if you think you're being "charitable" or whatever. Descartes introduced mind-body dualisms with the method of pure doubt, which at a first glance seemingly is a legitimate angle of attack.
Unfortunately that's about as nuanced as I know. Importantly this excludes out a wide amount of "any conflict that ends in a resolution validates Hegel" kind of sophistry.
>other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt
This is not quite accurate. Kant says very explicitly in the (rarely studied) Transcendental Doctrine of Method (Ch 1 Section 4, A789/B817) that this kind of proof method (he calls it "apagogic") is unsuitable to transcendental proofs.
You might be thinking of the much more well studied Antinomies of Pure Reason, in which he uses this kind of proof negatively (which is to say, the circumscribe the limits of reason) as part of his proof against the way the metaphysical arguments from philosophers of his time (which he called "dogmatic" use of reason) about the nature of the cosmos were posed.
The method he used in his Deduction is a transcendental argument, which is typically expressed using two things, X and Y. X is problematic (can be true but not necessarily so), and Y is dependent on X. So then if Y is true, then X must necessarily be true as well.
Sorry I meant "proof method" as more like "this was this guy's angle of attack", not that they would've thought each others angles were valid at all or that they're commensurable with say, 20th century formal proof logic (or Aristotelian logic for example). Descartes and Leibniz were squarely the rationalists that Kant wanted to abolish, and Hegel rejected Kants distinction between noumena and phenomena entirely, so they're already starting from very different places.
I guess it would be more accurate to state Kants actual premises here as making the distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself rather than the deduction, but the deduction technique itself was fascinating when I first learned it so that's what I associate most with Kant lol.
I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes. I just treated it as a vague category error (to be fair I don't actually know Descartes philosophy that well, even less than I know Kants lol). Could be a fun exercise when I have time.
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I remember first learning about Hegel when playing Fallout NV. Caesar made it seem so simple.
This is 100% true and a major pet peeve of mine.
Eh… it’s always worth keeping in mind the time period and what was going on with the tooling for mathematics and science at the time.
Statistics wasn’t really quite mature enough to be applied to let’s say political economy a.k.a. economics which is what Hegel was working in.
JB Say (1) was the leading mind in statistics at the time but wasn’t as popular in political circles (Notably Proudhon used Says work as epistemology versus Hegel and Marx)
I’ve been in serious philosophy courses where they take the dialectic literally and it is the epistemological source of reasoning so it’s not gone
This is especially true in how marx expanded into dialectical materialism - he got stuck on the process as the right epistemological approach, and marxists still love the dialectic and Hegelian roots (zizek is the biggest one here).
The dialectic eventually fell due to robust numerical methods and is a degenerate version version of the sampling Markov Process which is really the best in class for epistemological grounding.
Someone posted this here years ago and I always thought it was a good visual: https://observablehq.com/@mikaelau/complete-system-of-philos...
I thought the dialectic was just a proof methodology, and especially the modern political angles you might year from say a Youtube video essay on Hegel, was because of a very careful narrative from some french dude (and I guess Marx with his dialectical materialism). I mean, I agree with many perspectives from 20th century continental philosophy, but it has to be agreed that they refactored Hegel for their own purposes, no?
Oh the amount of branching and forking and remixing of Hegel is more or less infinite
I think it’s worth again pointing out that Hegel was at the height of contemporary philosophy at the time but he wasn’t a mathematician and this is the key distinction.
Hagel lives in the pre-mathematical economics world. The continental philosophy world of words with Kant etc… and never crossed into the mathematical world. So I liking it too he was doing limited capabilities and tools that he had
Again compare this to the scientific process described by Francis Bacon. There are no remixes to that there’s just improvements.
Ultimately using the dialectic is trying to use an outdated technology for understanding human behavior
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