A GERMAN HOBBY CALLED “CONTRADICTION” or CUSANUS, HEGEL, MARX

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Let´s be greek and dive today on…

a German Philosophical Hobby called "Contradiction".

Classically, something cannot be A and not-A at the same time and in the same respect. Aristotle made the principle of non-contradiction the foundation of rational thought.
Find a contradiction and somewhere your reasoning is wrong: this inference (Reductio ad Absurdum) leads THE path to the necessary logical conclusion in many complex reasonings until nowadays. And it is, fundamentally, in the realm of science, universally accepted.

And yet, some germans and a their greek spiritual father... had some things to say...

In the midst of the great XVth-century theological and political dispute over whether supreme authority in the Church belonged to the Pope or to a general council, NICHOLAS CUSANUS will give a philosophical solution to this political problem: our finite reason understands the world by distinguishing opposites: one/many, finite/infinite...
But... what appears contradictory from our perspective is not contradictory from the perspective of Infinity where opposites can ultimately coincide: his famous coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites).
Take a Circle, as its radius becomes larger, its circumference becomes progressively less curved. At the limit of an infinite radius, Cusanus argues, the circumference coincides with a straight line.
Opposed geometrical forms coincide at infinity, and Infinity means, essentially, God.
Contradiction, in other words, is a matter of perspective... and faith.

What seems as a philosophical trick to solve a political problem was the germ of a reflexion that will last for centuries among German Philosophers... deeply rooted 25 centuries before.

HERACLITUS the Obscure (VI-V, BC) , the Greek sage from Ephesus, saw the tension of opposites as structural—something woven into the fabric of reality.
Everything changes. Opposition remains.
A constant. The Constant.

The pen of the most Heraclitean German thinker will storm Europe in the midst of the Napoleonic invasions defining Philosophy and much of the politics for the next 200 years.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL understood "Contradiction" NOT as a reasoning mistake but rather as the essence of reality itself.
Lets be honest: Hegel saw contradiction everywhere. In the being itself (something is A and immediately after something different, therefore not-A), in the thinking processes (successive attempts to grasp reality pivot permanently from opposite concepts until moreless stabilizing, temporarily, somewhere...), in the social and political relations... its hard to find a dimension where he did not find or explored it, because his adrenalinic prose went literally... everywhere... and everywhere he found Contradiction.

But the core of Hegel’s intuition is understanding CONTRADICTION AS The Fundamental Engine of Transformation.
In a radically new and (both philosophically and historically) revolutionary move, Hegel claims that things transform not merely because something happens to them from outside but because tensions generated within then push them beyond themselves.
That is his extraordinary philosophical breakthrough.

Contradiction, therefore, lies at the very heart of movement and transformation.

CONTRADICTION IS THE AGENT OF CHANGE.

You want to understand where a phenomenon is going, how it might develop or transform?
Look at its internal contradictions.
Those are the tensions that prevent it from simply remaining what it is— to show us where its transformation may come from, and therefore, will go.

It is the famous “Thesis–Antithesis–Synthesis”, a formula Hegel himself never wrote.
More accurately expressed as “Affirmation–Negation–Negation of the Negation”, the movement is embodied in the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, an extraordinary German word meaning, at once, something close to “cancellation, preservation and elevation.”

The term itself contains the whole Hegelian movement: something is negated, but not simply destroyed;
something of it is preserved while being transformed and carried into a new form.
And all those things happen… altogether.

The influence of Hegel is such that both Fascism and Communism consider themselves... Hegelians.
Yes, totally true. Contradiction... you said ?

A third German will put the cherry on the cake: KARL MARX
inherits from Hegel the intuition that contradiction is an engine of development... but Karl will make Contradiction into the engine of History itself.

Integrating Hegelian Dialectics (Contradiction AS Engine) with a new Political perspective of the Materialist tradition...
because, you know, for human beings nothing is more material than.. Food.

If you want to understand where a society is moving and where the pressure for transformation comes from...
Look at its internal contradictions—and, above all, at the contradictions in the way it produces and distributes material life... Food, shelter, etc...

His contemporary societies provide Karl with a great laboratory filled with contradictions: enormous productive capacity and persistent deprivation; increasingly collective production and private appropriation; technological development that can reduce necessary labour while simultaneously making people's survival dependent upon selling their labour.
These are not accidental problems, claims Karl, appearing from outside the system but rather the system itself generates them through its own development.

CONTRADICTION HAS NOW BECOME HISTORICAL.

Lets think about contradictions...
or perhaps not.

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