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.
Thank you I think I understand what you mean. I guess my main way of determining an opposing force versus a state is that I view opposing forces as somehow quantifiable.
Like for water, the states of liquid, solid, and gas (water, ice, steam) the thing that changes them (assuming constant pressure, for the sake of this example) is temperature. The configuration of the H~2~O molecules is what determines its state. That configuration is determined by how much those molecules are moving around. How much they move around depends on how much energy in inputted into the molecule. The force that's keeping them together are hydrogen bonds and the force that causes them to move around is the energy of the molecules.
So the place I have issues with is now, what are the opposing forces between the state of solid water and the state of liquid water? Temperature is the quantifiable measure, but what drives temperature? Would it be strength of hydrogen bonds and kinetic energy of H~2~O molecules?
Maybe so. I guess I don't know enough about biology and physics to say much on that. 😅 I think you're on the right path with it though, trying to work out what drives it.
To try to tie it in to what CriticalResist was saying earlier (here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10149030/7490110 and here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10149030/7490240), in particular this:
Maybe the question to ask is, what process/processes in the composition of liquid, solid, and gas contain a movement that can form the negation of the process?
I will do some layperson attempt to research into it. Here is a source on "phase transitions" in chemistry:
https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/Southwestern_College/Chem_210%3A_Southwestern/10%3A_Solids_Liquids_and_Phase_Transitions/10.05%3A_Phase_Transitions
It sounds like broadly speaking, energy is the common factor in the motion between these particular states. Which in the case of input of energy (endothermic) is what we call "heat".
Though how any of this could/would translate to internal negation, I'm having a hard time with. But I am also a bit mush brain in general right now. Holiday season somehow manages to be extra stressful and to be fair to myself, this is straight up science we're getting into.
Perhaps if energy is the common thread than the two forces would be, in the intermolecular context, kinetic energy and potential energy.
KE in physics basically just means the energy of in motion ( 1/2×(mass×velocity^2^)~object~). Wheras PE is the energy that can be turned into KE that's available due to an object's position (mass×acceleration×position, in most simple contexts its gravitational acceleration = mgh). Though PE can be used in a bunch of different configurations which are more complicated.
Regardless Kinetic and Potential Energy exist beyond the simplified examples I gave, such as in the intermolecular context, though I've not brushed up on my chemistry enough to give the exact form.
Without PE, KE can't exist as it's impossible for that energy for motion to be created from nothing.
Fascinating. It sounds like it's a very low level (meaning close to the fundamentals of the universe) exploration of dialectical materialism.