system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is dialectical thinking? And how can it be applied to the world today?

Help! Trying to find a simplified explanation of the dialectic, with examples if possible.
gpt
So there are quite a few thinkers in history who have used dialectics-- Aristotle, Plato, Kant etc...--however the thinker(s) most people will associate the dialectic with is Hegel, and later, Marx. The dialectic can roughly follow this path: There is a subject/idea/condition that exists known as the *thesis*. This thesis confronts that which is contradictory to it, known as the *antithesis* (anti-thesis). The struggle between these two is resolved by an overcoming of their contradiction. Now Hegel uses the word 'Aufhebung' to describe this interaction which is better understood as a sublation or transcendence rather than the typical translation as a "synthesis". 

For Hegel however, this was a process that played out in human consciousness. Marx will take this framework of thesis, antithesis, synthesis/Aufhebung and apply it materially to the world. Marx's theory of history is one in which internal contradictions within a society confront the given social relations, spawning a new society. This historical dialectic that Marx uses tracks the development of slave society into feudal, feudal into capitalist, and capitalist into communist, where the communist society is the final overcoming of the inherent contradictions Marx saw in class society. 

The dialectic is used in many of the social sciences and humanities as a tool for inquiry. For example, in comparative politics, the dialectic is used by many--Duverger, Kirchheimer, Katz & Mair-- to track the development in the ways that political parties organize. In feminist theory the dialectic is used by Simone de Beauvoir in *The Second Sex* to put forth an understanding of women as man's antithesis. While not a social science, the dialectic is used in the field of history as a way of understanding social classes and how their competing goals are the engine of historical developments.