This is the eighth in a series of Blogs on personal management and how to lead a life worth living and be happy.
Dialectics is a way of thinking. I've found it very helpful for many, many years. It's a way of thinking, a way you think about life, how you manage yours and the happiness that comes with it.
It’s a word I first came across whilst researching an undergraduate dissertation ‘Tracing the Roots of the Environment Movement’.
I wasn’t a particularly good student! Living in industrial West Yorkshire I was more interested in exploring the landscape on foot and bicycle, more interested in socialising and drinking beer. However I did use dialectics as part of my research.
Yellowing paper and typed script shows that is was written quite a while ago! I used dialectics to try and understand the social change of the 1960’s and 70’s, explaining the rise of the environment movement. It’s still relevant today as we increasingly become aware of the negative ecological and climatic impact of the way we live, and the need to change this.
So what does 'dialectics' mean?
The art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments.
The existence or action of opposing social forces, concepts etc
Dialectics is a process associated with the German philosopher Hegel. A process of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis, and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis. The total process he called ‘thought’. It was his way of understanding the human experience through the perceptions of the mind. Engels and Marx were influenced by Hegel, their dialectical materialism was a way of understanding social conditions through real world conditions and their contradictions.
What is sometimes forgotten with Hegel is that he was not just concerned with the rational and scientific aspects of the mind. The virtue of his dialectic, he thought, was that it could demonstrate the relationship between facts and values. External facts and internal values.
I think there are both internal and external factors that impact on our life and our ability to manage it and our happiness. It's why I think dialectics is useful in personal management as it is a tool to manage change over time. Visualise your current situation, this is the thesis, but then something happens that impacts upon you, be it an external event or a change in your values. Then think about the opposite of your situation, the other person's view, the counterpoint, this is the antithesis. The dynamic between these two - the thesis and its opposite the antithesis - is helpful in identifying a new situation for you that resolves the problem. This is the synthesis. Over time the synthesis becomes your new thesis, and so on. This I call the Dynamic of Personal Change and is a way of helping to resolve problems in life be they social, economic, political, personal or emotional.
In the context of trying to live a life worth living, the Happiness Spectrum is an example of a dialectic - a spectrum from happiness to unhappiness/suffering. Dialectical thinking is a useful way of helping to bring about personal change. Both extremes of the Happiness Spectrum exist at the same time, as well as all points in between. Acceptance that happiness is dynamic and ever changing enables choice and from that action. It's the tensions and contradictions within the spectrum that influence our rational and emotional mind. Internal and external factors affect us and we react to them based, in part, upon the values we hold. How we react, the actions we take, determine whether we become happier or not as we respond to things that happen to us. In dialectical terms, the thesis is the situation we find ourselves in somewhere between happy and unhappy, this is directly related to how we are trying to live, the antithesis is our reaction as a consequence of our situation, the synthesis is the new situation which hopefully is happier because we have taken action that helps us restore those things that are important to us, i.e. helps us live a life worth living. If not then we learn from the experience and try something else. The Happiness Spectrum is a way of thinking about our happiness, but it also suggests some practical ways to help manage our life. External factors we often cannot control. However we can control our mind, rather than our mind controlling us. We can manage our reactions to external events that affect our emotions and behaviour.
For a number of years I've been involved with an organisation called Te Whare Mahana Trust (TWM), a community based mental health service provider. They’re the only organisation in New Zealand that runs a residential Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) programme. This is an evidence based treatment that helps people who have difficulty controlling or managing their emotions and behaviours.
Dialectical as part of DBT means that two opposite ideas can be true at the same time! It stresses the importance of seeing the world not in black and white terms, but instead to see the shades of colour. DBT was developed by Marsha Linehan as a technique for treating people with Borderline Personality Disorder .
The roles I've had at TWM have not been clinical, but I can see that some of the techniques used in DBT can be useful for anyone who wants to bring about change in their life, one that is worth living, that includes that emotional state we call happiness. Their strap-line is:
'a life worth living'.
One such skill is ‘mindfulness’, not so much because it directly brings about change, but because it can make you aware of your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and actions in the present moment, without criticism or judgement. It can help you shift your thoughts from dwelling in the past. It can help you shift your thoughts about anxieties and worries of the future.
Mindfulness is about learning to control your mind rather than your mind control you. It’s a helpful precursor to managing change as it's an awareness of the present that allows you to shift your attention to those things that you want in your life. It helps you to react to external situations that impact on you in a way that is helpful, rather than negative or destructive.
Here’s a mindfulness task to try. In a previous blog I played the sounds of our dawn chorus. I’ve copied the link again below. Sit comfortably, relax your breathing and just listen to the sounds. Try to count the different bird songs or other sounds. Just focus on the recording and every time your mind wanders (onto the things you have to do later, or the worries you have, or to a random piece of music etc) bring it back to the birds. Mindfulness itself will not change you but it helps you become aware of those things you want to do, what in previous blogs I’ve called ‘purpose’. Act upon your purpose and you’re likely to be happy. The recording is only a minute long so next time, sit comfortably somewhere outside and repeat the process listening to the sounds of where you are for 5 minutes.
Next time I’ll continue this theme and talk about ‘WISE Mind’.
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