This excellent video on dialectical materialism got me thinking more about the pedagogy of practicing and learning it: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10142756
Which is a fancy way of saying, I thought, "What if school-like exercises for practicing the components of it to grapple with comprehension and retention of it?" After all, quantitative engagement with its component parts could lead to qualitative change in understanding. :)
In Mao's essay On Contradiction, he gives examples such as:
In mechanics: action and reaction. In physics: positive and negative electricity. In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms. In social science: the class struggle. In war, offence and defence, advance and retreat, victory and defeat are all mutually contradictory phenomena. One cannot exist without the other. The two aspects are at once in conflict and in interdependence, and this constitutes the totality of a war, pushes its development forward and solves its problems.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
The idea is to expand on that with what you can think of.
What I wrote down so far:
hot and cold; growth and decay; strength and weakness; noisy and quiet; action and rest; theory and practice; imagination and sensation; wet and dry; beginning and end; the forest and the trees (e.g. big picture and the details, collective and individual); spiritual and secular; venerated and vulgarized.
So now I put it to you: What are some more examples of this?
Bonus question: What's an example of something that can occur when opposing forces collide?
P.S. Feel free to correct with a why, if you believe something shared is not an example of opposing forces. Just remember to think of it as for teaching and learning.
Would sleep and awake count? or do things like dreams muddy that?
I also remember this from Chapter 3 from Vol 1 of Capital, Marx brought up this to, which I also think fits here? I just like Marx bringing up this specific example involving motion and orbit.
That's an interesting question. In how people tend to think of sleep, I'd say dreams count as a part of it. But I'm not sure what the science is on sleep. If dreams are a form of cognitive activity and sleep is thought of as a rest from activity, that would seem contradictory to say sleep is fully a respite from activity. But dreams are also only an unconscious activity (with the exception of lucid dreams, which at least appear to involve some amount of conscious intent). It might be more precise to say that (at least for human beings) sleep is the sensory mode when inactive and awake is the sensory mode when active. Though even then, dreams do seem to be able to draw from the senses to an extent, such as if you're sleeping and need to pee, and so you start dreaming of looking for a bathroom. So the sensory mode is not 100% shut down all the time throughout sleep. Which makes sense now I think about it because you kinda need some amount of it still active to look for threats, know when to wake up, etc.
Phenomenon like sleep paralysis might be an example of the opposing forces "sleep and awake" "colliding"? There's a sort of jolting crossover between the two states, rather than a smooth transition from the one to the other.
Also, thanks for sharing the passage. It's an important aspect of this for us to understand, is how the contradictions can exist alongside one another and what form that takes.