thenecrosoviet wrote:im not too sure if this belongs here, since i know nothing of hagel except marx wrote a critique of hagel, anywho, i was wondering if someone could give me a quick rundown about hagel and his beliefs
The name is
Hegel. Hegel's importance to the philosophy on which scientific socialism is build on, lies in the fact that Hegel had developed
dialectics (ie. developement through contradiction, everythings' interaction with everything etc.). Marx and Engels however couldn't accept Hegel's dialectics as such, because they were
materialists while Hegel was an
idealist. Marx and Engels thought that Hegel's dialectics had an element of thruth in it, but it was "standing on it head" (because Hegel's philosophy was
objective idealism. It had to be put "on its feet", ie. on the basis of materialist philosophy. When they had done this and developed it further, they had created the philosophy of
dialectical materialism.
DiaMat isn't SO complicated as one might think. My advice would be the following:
-Try to think of DM as an opposite to the older, vulgar forms of materialism (mechanical materialism). (For example when vulgar materialists said that thought is matter, DMists say that while consciousness exists materially, it's not matter, just as while there isn't motion without matter, motion isn't matter)
-Don't get stuck in things like the general laws of materialism. They are important but it's better to understand the basic ideas before trying remember all formulas