Žižek tells us[i] that Hegel’s
dialectics has been falsely interpreted as a closed circle: he intended the end
as a new beginning.[ii] This goes beyond
the old Aristotelian idea that things have a potential that is realized in the
end. With Hegel, on the path to realization of potential a new potential is
created. The question now is how this works. Unless I missed something in
Hegel, he gives no explanation how, by what logic, dialectics works, produces
novelty, from opposition or tension.
In a later item in this blog I will discuss ontology: the philosophy of
being, of things in the world. There, I will use the idea, shared by Graham
Harman and Tristan Garcia, that there are two dimensions to objects in the
world: first, how they are composed, ‘what is in them’ and second their position
in their environment, ‘what they are in’[iii].
The first is the analytic view of science, breaking things down into
their components, the second is the phenomenological view, considering the
lived experience of things. The latter connects with philosophical pragmatism
and Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘meaning as use’. I will now claim that the two
arise from each other: how something is composed determines, in part, how it
exists in its context, and that, in turn, affects how it is composed. How does
that work?
For transformation, in this blog (item 31), and in a book published in
2000), I proposed a ‘cycle’ of discovery or invention. I did not develop it
with Hegel in mind, at least not consciously, but was perhaps fed by prior
readings of Hegel. I was inspired, more explicitly, by the theory of the
developmental psychologist Jean Piaget concerning the development of
intelligence in children. The basic idea there is that when one is confronted
with new experience, the attempt is made to assimilate
it in existing mental frames, and when that fails such frames are accommodated. I now wonder if it can be
seen as a further development of Hegelian thought. In a later item in this blog
I will propose that it clarifies ontology, in what I call dynamic ontology.
To recall, I proposed that the cycle of change starts with generalization, defined as application
of a practice in novel contexts. In the novel context, the practice is
challenged by new conditions of survival. What had been adopted as a universal
is confronted with novel particulars.
Note the link with evolution here, with the idea that novelty, in speciation, arises from challenges in a
new selection environment. The
classic example is the emergence of new species after the disastrous crash of a
meteor on earth, which made the dinosaurs and other species extinct. In
innovation policy some firms now actively seek novel markets to find out
limitations by identifying failures, as a source of innovation.
Faced with failure in a novel context, the first step, which stays as
close as possible to the existing frame, is to ‘tweak’ that frame, in differentiation, in trying out different
variants of the same, with recollection of earlier forms that were at play in
the emergence of the present practice.
This may not suffice for survival in the new context. Here is where
Hegelian opposition or contradiction kicks in. In the failure of the practice
one gets to really know it, with its limitations that call for renewal.
From the conflict between practice and the novel context, experiments
arise, in what (adopting the terminology of Piaget) I call reciprocation, inserting elements from practices met in the novel
context that seem to succeed where the old practice fails, into the logic of
the old practice. This yields misfits between the old and the new, novelties that
conflict with existing logic.
This, I think, is the fundamental step in dialectics: experimenting with
hybrids of the old and the new, to discover ways of relieving the tension between
them. It allows for the exploration of the potential of novel elements, and of the
limitations of the old logic that obstruct the realization of the new potential,
which gives hints in what directions a novel logic might be explored.
Necessity is both the mother and the midwife of invention.
Novelty, as it emerges in a new basic logic, is hesitant at first,
labouring with inconsistencies or frictions that remain, with fall-backs into
the old, requiring further adjustments in the constellation of the new basic
logic and its elements, until it settles into what in the innovation literature
is called a ‘dominant design’.
In sum: in moving to a new place or context one encounters the need and
insight to open up content to new possibilities. What was taken as a universal
is confronted with deviant particulars (see the preceding item in this blog).
Note the similarity to the hermeneutic
circle (item 36, 252).
Note that the cycle is in fact a spiral, not a closed loop.
Is this helpful as an elaboration, elucidation, or
twist of Hegelian dialectics?
[i] In his Parallax view.
[ii] The Latin word terminus can mean ‘end point’ as well as
‘starting point’.
[iii] Tristan Garcia, 2014, Form and
object; A treatise on things, Edinburgh Press.
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