How to understand Mao's "On Contradiction"?
How to understand Mao's "On Contradiction"?
The contradiction between my brain capacity and the genius that went into Mao's writings gave me a headache. I need an adult please.
Lets start by asking, in reference to:
"It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another. As a matter of fact, even mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things. Simple growth in plants and animals, their quantitative development, is likewise chiefly the result of their internal contradictions."
I kind of understand what is meant here, but isn't plant and animal growth governed by multiple different chemical reactions?
I don't have a biology degree but there aren't just two chemical reactions acting in opposition to each other, or a set of pairs of chemical reactions, right?
How can something so complex be reduced to pairs of opposites? Doesn't that impose a limitation? What if instead of a dialectic its an n-alectic where n can possibly reach the thousands or millions (since things "differ qualitatively in thousands of ways")? Is this really what Mao wanted to convey?
Obviously his ideas were "right" because they helped develop a correct understanding of reality such that Mao won wars. I just don't understand what is meant.
Dialectics doesn't really imply pairs of things, there can be any number of things that are all each other's opposites. When we look at a single relation, it is between two things, but a full analysis very often includes multiple relations.
It is worth noting that whether dialectics applies to the natural world like chemistry inside plants is a topic of some controversy. Mao also uses the word "contradiction" in a very general sense, other writers might mean something more specific by it.
whether dialectics applies to the natural world like chemistry inside plants
There is an entire field of systems biology that studies biology through a quantitative framework where biological processes are regulated by complex feedback loops. That’s basically what dialectics is in its modern form.
Where can I read about this? I'm occasionally on a biology hyperfocus binge, gotta lay out the reading for the next one
Dialectics doesn't really imply pairs of things, there can be any number of things that are all each other's opposites.
Whoops I meant to ask moreso: Why does the base unit have to be an opposite though? Why not a triad?
It is worth noting that whether dialectics applies to the natural world like chemistry inside plants is a topic of some controversy.
Thats true, maybe I shouldn't focus on that part so much and instead focus on its application in social sciences. Thanks for the clarification.
The base unit is a relation. I at least see no reason why you could not choose to think of some system as a triad with a single relation, but I'm not sure how the result would be different from seeing it as two or three simple relations, or as a relation between one of the triad (at a time) and the rest of the system. After all, both sides of the relation also have their internal structure and contradictions.
there aren't just two chemical reactions acting in opposition to each other, or a set of pairs of chemical reactions, right?
actually that is sort of how chemistry works, you can introduce additional substances to change the result of the reaction, but a chemical reaction is a resolving of contradictions of sorts.
You need to think “feedback loops”, where an entire series of interactions with one another in complex manners (“contradictions”) and can give rise to emergent properties (all that is solid melts into air…)
Systems theory, which comes from the cybernetics theory of the 1930s, is arguably a modern, repackaged, quantitative version of dialectics. Both attempt to look at the world and understand it as shaped by complex interactions among its constituent components, rather than examining the individual parts (reductionism) which formed much of the basis of modern scientific framework.
In other words, dialectical framework examines and sees the world as a series of “contradictions” (relations between components and their interactions) rather than reductionist methodology that breaks down complex systems into their individual parts to simplify the attempt to understand them.