Dialectics, Continued

Dialectics means treating things like processes.  Thus, it is essentially systems thinking, though dialectics has a far richer history than systems thinking.  Dialectic is all about determining the significance and value of the processes that explain how things come into being.  Systems also include this processual, diachronic dimension in their notion. Dialectics has been traditionally understood to refer to the internal relations among individuals that define their processes of coming into being.  When we abstract an individual from the processes through which it came into being, we view it as static substance.  If we then view it outside of this context as real or concrete, we view it as finite.  If we continue to think of it as an abstraction, we may regard it as ideal, yet the driving idea behind systems thinking (and in process ontologies that are dialectical in their methods, e.g., Hegel and Marx) is that abstractions are concrete only when we view them in terms of the internal relations they have in their ideal dimension.  This means not viewing them as finite, but in terms of wholes.  Thus, these abstractions have no being outside of the relations they maintain with others.   Systems means thinking wholes, as does dialectics.  Systems can then be viewed as a philosophical trajectory within dialectics that defines things not as finite, concrete individuals, but as processes within wholes, or as events.  The key question in this type of thinking is, where does analysis end, where do we draw boundaries between things viewed ideally, in terms of diachronic processes and synchronic relations (which also have a diachronic dimension)?  The systemic theory of autopoiesis states that individual systems draw their own distinctions.  Yet if autopoietic systems theory has a fault, it is that it lacks a theory of dialectics.  It has no process ontology by which it might ground its claims.  It relies on empirical researches and regional ontologies.  It takes its systems as givens, that is, as concrete individual things.   But how do autopoietic systems themselves come into being?  Autopoietic systems theory has no answer for this, it doesn't care for one.  

Dialectics possesses the tools for autopoietic systems theory to think its ground, or grounding operations.