Thread: Hegelian Dialectic for Beginners

EVERY HOUR of EVERY DAY YOU CAN SEE THIS HAPPENING. If you cant, then go back to FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU ARE TOLD TO(it seems to be working for US) and AT LEAST TRY TO STAY OUT OF THE WAY.

Hegelian Dialectic
1.(thesis) Create a problem.
2.(antithesis) Generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria).
3.(synthesis) Offer the solution to the problem created by step one:

A change which would have been impossible to impose upon the people without the proper psychological conditioning achieved in stages one and two.


Hegelian Dialectic-

noun 1. (philosophy) an interpretive method in which the contradiction between a proposition (thesis) and its antithesis is resolved at a higher level of truth (synthesis)






Hegel for Beginners

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Source: Hegel for Beginners, by Llyod Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, Published by Icon Books, 14 of 175 pages reproduced here, minus the abundant illustrations.

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In 1808, Hegel still talked of constructing some sort of bridge between traditional logic set out in classical form by Aristotle and his own. Aristotlean logic had been the standard for 2,000 years.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) perfected a form of deductive argument called the syllogism.
"Classical reasoning assumes the principle of logical identity: A = A or A is not non-A".
Why did Hegel need a different logic? Perhaps you may already have seen the answer to this in Hegel's Phenomenology.
Hegel usually referred to the Phenomenology as his "psychology", because it was the only one of his writings which deals with the world, not as it appears to Absolute Mind (or Spirit) but to quite ordinary minds like our own. It traced a path from our everyday commonsense states of mind to the vantage point of "Systematic Science".
"But in writing that book I became aware of employing a new and unprecedented way of thinking".
Dialectical Thinking

Hegel's different way of thinking has become known as dialectical thinking. What makes dialectical thinking so difficult to explain is that it can only be seen in practice. It is not a "method" or a set of principles, like Aristotle's, which can be simply stated and then applied to whatever subject-matter one chooses.
How do we begin to understand how this dialectic works?
First, by beginning to appreciate Hegel's unique philosophical ambition.
Totality

For Hegel, only the whole is true. Every stage or phase or moment is partial, and therefore partially untrue. Hegel's grand idea is "totality" which preserves within it each of the ideas or stages that it has overcome or subsumed. Overcoming or subsuming is a developmental process made up of "moments" (stages or phases). The totality is the product of that process which preserves all of its "moments" as elements in a structure, rather than as stages or phases.
Think of these structural elements as the interrelated ones of a whole architecture or even better, a fractal architecture.
Aufhebung or Sublation

Aristotle's logic is concerned with separate, discrete (self-)identities in a deductive pattern. Hegel dissolves this classical static view in a dynamic movement towards the whole. The whole is an overcoming which preserves what it overcomes.
Nothing is lost or destroyed but raised up and preserved as in a spiral. Think of the opening of a fern or a shell.
This is an organic rather than mechanical logic. Hegel's special term for this "contradiction" of overcoming and at the same time preserving is Aufhebung, sometimes translated as "sublation".
For anything to happen, everything has to be in place.
Quantum theory, postmodern cosmology, chaos theory, computer interfacing and ecology all essentially subscribe to this view of "totality" in question, without being "hegelian".
A Grammar of Thinking

In Hegel's treatment of logic, thinking dwells on itself, rather than trying to comprehend the world. The Science of Logic deals with logical categories, not the accidents of history or various modes of relating to the world. It is rather absent or distant from the world as such.

"I liken my study of logic to the study of grammar. You only really see the rewards when you later come to observe language in use and you grasp what it is that makes the language of poetry so evocative".
Hegel deals with a sequence of logical categories: being, becoming, one, many, essence, existence, cause, effect, universal, mechanism, and "life". Each is examined in turn and made to reveal its own inadequacies and internal tensions. Each category is made to generate another more promising one which in its turn will be subject to the same kind of scrutiny.
Negation

Hegel calls this dynamic aspect of his thinking the power of "negation". It is by means of this "negativity" of thought that the static (or habitual) becomes discarded or dissolved, made fluid and adaptable, and recovers its eagerness to push on towards "the whole".
Dialectical thinking derives its dynamic of negation from its ability to reveal "contradictions" within almost any category or identity.
Hegel's "contradiction" does not simply mean a mechanical denial or opposition. Indeed, he challenges the classical notion of static self-identity, A = A, or A not= non-A.
By negation or contradiction, Hegel means a wide variety of relations difference, opposition, reflection or relation. It can indicate the mere insufficiency of a category or its incoherence. Most dramatically, categories are sometimes shown to be self-contradictory.
Three Kinds of Contradiction

• The three divisions of the Science of Logic involve three different kinds of contradiction. In the first division Being the opposed pair of concepts at first seem flatly opposed, as if they would have nothing at all to do with one another: Being Nothing / Quantity Quality. Only be means of analysis or deduction can they be shown to be intimately interrelated.
• In the second division Essence the opposed pairs immediately imply one another. The Inner and the Outer, for example: to define one is at the same time to define the other.
• In the third division the Concept [Notion] we reach an altogether more sophisticated level of contradiction. Here we have concepts such as identity whose component parts, Universality and Particularity, are conceptually interrelated.

The third level is more difficult to depict or illustrate than the others because it is truly abstract. Here we are talking about relations which can only be disentangled from one another by a process of abstraction.
For example. We can see how one of our most vital categories individuality can be built up out of a pair of apparently opposing principles, universality and particularity.
Triadic Structure

If negation is the inner life-force of the dialectic, then triadic structure is its organic, fractal form.