Becoming a profound thinker requires an understanding of Hegelian dialectics

The most profound thinker of our present age is in my view Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher and Director of the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He demonstrates in much of his work how popular understandings of various topics suffer from a mistaken subject-object interplay, and resolves the conflict by an application of Hegelian dialectical reasoning. Below follows some examples of this approach and from this I hope you can begin thinking more broadly and apply the method to various dynamics in your life. Fundamentally, the error in our thinking begins when we fail to note our own bias, and present the topic in a manner that is beneficial to ourselves, rather than by beginning by a challenge to our own ego-driven profilic view. Profilicity is a concept created by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Meuller of the University of Macau. Zizek and Meuller approach their work from a similar epistemological angle:

Hegelian dialectics are briefly the interplay of the opposites of everything, since the subject (person) defines himself and his existence in contrast or differentiation, but communicates about the topic in a way that is beneficial to them – in essence profiling the truth, what Zizek would call ideology, as an objective truth.

Example 1: Homelessness

Homelessness is often said to be a problem of poverty. The idea is that if the person had money by which to pay for housing, and a job to support themselves, they would live in a home and be like everyone else.

Why, then, is homelessness only a feature of modern urbanized cities, and specially those in the West, rather than a feature universally of all human societies?

Policeman: You cannot stay here. This is a city park. (THESIS)

Homeless man: But I have nowhere else to go. (ANTITHESIS)

Homelessness is a problem of disconnection, alienation, and social exclusion, not poverty. Even if the homeless man had money to pay for a home, and a job, he may still have “nowhere else to go,” except his home. That is a problem of disconnection from human community, and the home-lessness is only a symptom. Humans live in communities of other humans, not as individual agents in proximity to other humans (neoliberal capitalism). (SYNTHESIS)

Example 2: Grieving for Loved Ones who died

Relative: I loved him so much. I grieve for him. (THESIS)

Person: But he is no longer in pain and is no longer suffering. You however are suffering, because you have lost the utility of that person, and no longer have them in your life to help you, listen to you, or do what they used to do for you. Therefore your grief is a combination of fear and a sense of losing something that benefited you, not a grief for the loss of the life or the ending of suffering for your relative. (ANTITHESIS)

We grieve not for the person who died, but for ourselves. We grieve that *we* will no longer have the person in our lives, which is a selfish impulse, not one about the deceased relative. (SYNTHESIS)

Example 3: Human Sexuality

Person 1: Human females are attracted to the highest status males – by securing a mate who is wealthy and high status, the female secures the necessary provisions for her offspring. Therefore, human males must achieve and seek prominence and wealth to be attractive to females. (THESIS)

Person 2: Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were very high status males, were very rich, and yet they had to resort to rape and drugging women in order to have sex. Meanwhile, a visit to any school at the end of the day will show men who work as plumbers, and drivers and construction workers picking up their children from school. (ANTITHESIS)

Humans tell stories to ourselves to obtain a meaningful life. But the truth lies in the external experience of what we do, not what we believe or say. We explain all aspects of life in a manner that is rational, what the Frankfurt school called “Dialectics of Enlightenment.” But often, these stories are created due to an aversion to confront the aspects of our existence we would rather not accept as true: our animal nature that is driven by cosmetics of external appearance. (SYNTHESIS)

Example 4: Abortion

Pro-Life/Anti-abortionist: I oppose abortion because I care about the life of the unborn children.

Abortionist: How could you possibly care about the life of all of the unborn children, given that you will not know any of them even if they were born. There are children dying right now all over the world, and you could probably help many of them by donating just a little money, and yet you do not. Therefore, you do not actually care about the child, you care because the act attacks a precept of your world-view that you treasure: that every mother loves her children more than anything else in the world. (ANTITHESIS)

Humans do not perceive the world as it is exactly since it is too complex and there are too many variables. Therefore we form cultural views which are usually taught to us about what is true and what is false and then act in the world according to those axiomatic principles. One of those principles is that of the mother who is all self-sacrificing and all-loving. It is a form of dogma, and myth. Plenty of mothers murder their own children, many mothers are cruel to their children, and many mothers abort their children. Therefore the opposition to abortion is actually acting out against an attack on a dearly loved axiomatic ideological premise which is rooted in cultural mythology, as the acceptance that not all mothers are universally loving would require the subject to embrace the possibility that their own mother didn’t love them. (SYNTHESIS)