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Nornagest comments on The dangers of dialectic - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (9)
I've suspected for a while that "synthesis" is a bad word for the Hegelian/Marxist idea and that the concept is better approximated by something along the lines of "supersession", or "dissolution" to put it in LW-ese: the establishment of a new framework that renders the previous dichotomy irrelevant. This can involve combining dichotomous elements but doesn't have to.
In the context of the 1800s politics that Marx would have been familiar with, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that this would necessarily involve people getting shot at.
Hegel did use synthesis. I think the go-to reference is his book The Logic of Science, whose title I remember only because I heard a lecturer describe it as being peculiar for a book that contained no discussion of either logic or science. By "logic" he meant his dialectic method, which is not logical (in the sense of having operators with defined outcomes).
You're looking for the German word Aufhebung.
Har har. Wissenschaft has a broader meaning than science. The book does actually discuss logic, devoting an entire section to the analysis of the various meanings of being.
More cached thoughts for you to clean out.
I think it's worth quoting some of the Wikipedia article on Aufhebung that you link to:
No Wonder we're confused.
Hegel does quite strange things to language. He wrote in German and any English translation is not going to get everything right.