Somebody at Yahoo!Answers asks what is "dialectical materialism." When answering such a question I try to abstract from the whole question of my personal reaction to the thing to be defined and just ... well ... answer the question. Regular readers of this blog will know perfectly well that my reaction to DiaMat is negative. But that wasn't asked! So I went with this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dialectical materialism is the metaphysical side of Marxism. On the one hand there is Hegel, the Towering Figure of mid 19th century German thought. Hegel developed a system sometimes known as "dialectical idealism" which says that the world moves in zig-zags, and that the ultimate goal of the movement is an Absolute Idea that knows itself and is all in all. God, then, is not the Creator of the world but its summation and Judge, and the world moves in its zig zag (back-and-forth among contraries, but none...