Sreerama Varma Raja P C

Dialectics and the Dialectical Method in Western Philosophy

Dialectics or the dialectical method refers to the discourse between two or more people who wish to arrive at the true knowledge. Various philosophers have used the terms ‘dialectic’ or the ‘dialectic method’ and have imagined their own meanings to them. This essay briefly introduces the exploration of the dialectic or the dialectic method by philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels.

Dialectics had the simplest meaning attached to it perhaps in the dialogues of Socrates. For Socrates, the dialectical method is about asking a series of questions to a person until a vague belief that they had turned into a precise statement. A good example of this is in Plato’s ‘Gorgias’, where the dialectical method is exercised between Socrates and Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. As Socrates’ goal in this process was to reach true knowledge, he was ready to change his mind if the dialectical process led him to. The main goal of the dialectical method in this example is to establish a precise definition of rhetoric and to use argumentation and questioning to make that definition even more precise.

When it comes to Plato, he was able to imagine a whole different dimension to the dialectical method, which went along with his overall metaphysical outlook. For Plato, the dialectic takes up an ontological and metaphysical role in terms of becoming the process through which the intellect passes from sensibles to intelligibles. It keeps going from idea to idea until it finally arrives at the supreme idea, the first principle, which is the origin of everything. Plato thought that a philosopher is primarily a dialectician. In this manner, the dialectic is imagined to be a process of inquiry that starts with hypotheses and leads up to the first principle. It is also something that slowly embraces the multiplicity in unity.

Aristotle’s interaction with the dialectical method occurs when he compares it to the art of rhetoric. He observes Plato’s inference that rhetoric is a counterpart of the dialectic and resembles it. Aristotle then proceeds to add on to that by claiming that rhetoric is nothing but an outgrowth of the dialectic and in that sense, rhetoric has to be a part of the dialectic.

We see the term dialectic long after the age of the ancient Greeks, in 18th century Germany, in the works of Immanuel Kant. In ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’, there is a subsection named ‘Transcendental Dialectics’. What Kant tries to communicate through that subsection is the dissection of dialectical illusions. It tries to effectively expose the fraudulent nature of the non-empirical employment of knowledge and understanding. The transcendental dialectic is about how pure reason should not be used. Kant thinks that our rational faculty is plagued with dialectic illusions as we attempt to know what he thinks can never be known. Using the examples of paralogisms and antinomies of pure reason, Kant essentially opens up a gaping hole in the tradition of pure reason and rationalism.

Georg Wilhelm Hegel, another giant in modern German philosophy, engaged with the idea of the dialectic as a response to the problem with reason and rationalism that Kant pointed out in ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’. What Hegel did, however, was to give a whole different imagination to the dialectic, by taking it from a mere method of arriving at true knowledge to the fundamental process through which movement in nature and history occurs. He thought that this occurs through a process involving the triad of the abstract, the negative, and the concrete. For example, in his work ‘Logic’, he explains this using the dialectical nature of existence itself. At first, existence is posited as pure Being. But pure Being, upon examination, is indistinguishable from Nothing. When it is realized that what is coming into Being is, at the same time, also returning to Nothing, both Being and Nothing are united as Becoming. This can be applied to the real world, where a person who is living is also dying at the same time, and this makes the experience of life an experience of Becoming.

Karl Marx was greatly inspired by Hegel in terms of how powerful the dialectical process is. But Marx disagreed on one thing with Hegel. It was that while Hegel was an idealist, Marx was a materialist. Nonetheless, Marx applied the dialectical process not to the world of ideas, but to the real world. That is to say that Marx combined historical materialism and the dialectical process. This is how he formulated the famous philosophy of dialectical materialism, which became the backbone of Marxist thought. Marx saw a dialectical process happening in history where when the enslavement that came with slavery and serfdom met with the economic freedom and individualism that came with capitalism, a democratic state turned out to be the dialectical end result.

Friedrich Engels developed further on the dialectical materialism of Marx and applied it to natural processes in his work ‘Dialectics of Nature’. He saw that the process by which a change in quantity results in a change in quality as a dialectical process. An example of this would be water turning into steam when the temperature increases.

All these developments of the different imaginations of the idea of the dialectic did bring much frustration to philosophers of the analytic tradition and philosophers of science. Karl Popper was perhaps the most prominent critic of the dialectical process. He writes in his work ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ that the strain of thought that rose from Hegelian dialectic played a major role in the downfall of the liberal movement in Germany and was responsible to some degree for the rise of fascism in Europe since it encourages irrationalism. Popper also thought that the Marxist dialectical materialism was fundamentally a form of historicism and that it encouraged a totalitarian form of thinking. Mario Bunge, a philosopher of science, also came forward with a criticism of Engels’ idea of natural dialectics, accusing it of being fuzzy and remote from science. He also claimed that they have a disastrous legacy and that they are false as much as they are unintelligible.

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