Flogging the Dialectical Horse

  1. The Joker
    The Joker
    Hello fellow philosophers.

    I just joined Philosophers Place and am dismayed to learn that it's been almost a full year since anyone posted anything here. What happened? Did you figure out the answers to the eternal questions of philosophy? Are the problems of freewill and the nature of consciousness all wrapped up? Have you divined all the requirements for the perfectly just state?

    I think not.

    So, why the apathy? I feel like we need to shake things up around here. We need a Kant to our metaphysics, a Rawls to our political philosophy, a Socrates to our... erm.. pre-Socratics. To that end, I'm going to wade right in with some Hegelian dialectics. Everyone loves Hegelian dialectics, right? *Pulls up a chair*.

    G.W.F. Hegel (may his surly bones rest in peace) invented (or, rather, was the first person to acknowledge) the dialectical nature of processes, whether of thought (epistemology and logic), history or ethics. The dialectic, according to Hegel, is not merely a philosophical process: it is an ontological principle (read: 'fact of life outside of philosophy'). The process of the dialectic moves (necessarily, according to Hegel) from inwardness and abstraction to outwardness and concretion. It does this by means of contradiction and negation.

    All clear then?

    Not really. That paragraph is pretty much all I have in the dialectical tank. You could be forgiven for thinking I actually knew what I was talking about. I don't. I'm merely parroting what I've read, heard, seen regarding the dialectic, both online and off. My knowledge of it is purely superficial, linguistic. Soundbytes and buzzwords I've picked up from Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

    Of course, I'm better placed than some people trying to come to grips with the dialectic. I wrote a paper on Hegel in my pre-Master's year, for which I garnered the unlikely mark of A+ (I didn't come on here to brag, honest). However, I had a very generous professor and, most importantly, the paper was nothing to do with his dialectics. How did I write a paper on Hegel without knowing squat about the dialectic? A good question, and one to which I'm afraid I still don't know the answer.

    I've wrestled with the concept of the dialectic for years (in a desultory and sporadic fashion, admittedly). The literature is full of a misleading thesis-antithesis-synthesis formulation that Hegel himself explicitly rejects. Why do people still insist on using it? Who knows. I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of people who pretend to know what the dialectic is (like me) actually don't have a clue what they're talking about. If only the big man were alive today to explain it to us!

    It's not been all doom and gloom. Sometimes (usually late at night, after too much coffee) I've caught a glimpse of something, the tantalising flicker of a monolithic truth, only to have it recede out of my grasp. Trying to figure out the dialectic is like trying to remember a word that's on the tip of your tongue. You know the answer's there - you can almost taste it - but you can't quite bring it into whatever lobe of your brain it needs to be in to be able to say "Aha, I've got you!"

    One possible way to understand it might be to see the dialectic, not as descriptive, but as proscriptive. That is to say, Hegel doesn't think the dialectic IS the fundamental mechanism of processes of history, thought etc. Rather, it's a way of interpreting these processes in order to give them value and meaning. On that reading, the dialectic becomes less mystical and easier to understand. History is successive cycles of decreasingly imperfect freedoms trying to actualise themselves because WE happen to be LIBERAL and the idea of freedom is IMPORTANT to us - not because freedom is some mystical energy turning the wheels of history and trying to break out. Unfortunately, this reading doesn't account for the necessity that Hegel's philosophy relies on for its claims to objective truth, rendering it merely (and unattractively) contingent. *Sigh*.

    Can anyone help me out? I've been in the dialectical weeds for years. Let's kick some life back into this tired old horse (the group, that is, not the dialectic).
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