Dialectic

Dialectic, in philosophy, method of investigating the nature of truth by the criticism of initial concepts and hypotheses. One of the earliest examples of the dialectical method was the Dialogues of the Greek philosopher Plato, in which the author shows his predecessor, Socrates, arriving at the truth concerning the good, beauty, justice, or the human soul by persistently interrogating the common-sense views of those with whom he engaged in dialogue, until they find that their views lead to contradictions. Plato’s most famous pupil, Aristotle, thought of dialectic as the search for the philosophical basis of science, and he frequently used the term as a synonym for the science of logic.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term “transcendental dialectic” to describe the method by which he attempted to demonstrate that it is not possible to have knowledge that goes beyond one’s experience. The dialectic consisted in showing that to assume otherwise leads to a series of contradictions, such as the contradiction between the idea that people are free and the idea that people are determined. Such contradictions can only be resolved by giving up the idea of knowledge that goes beyond experience and making a clear distinction between things as they are “for us”, which can be known, and things as they are “in themselves”, which cannot be known.

Kant’s successor G. W. F. Hegel famously applied the term “dialectic” to his philosophical system. Hegel believed that the evolution of concepts occurs through a dialectical process—that is, a concept gives rise to its opposite, and as a result of this conflict, a third view, the synthesis, arises, or else a form of consciousness, through reflection on itself, discovers a contradiction within itself, and is thereby forced to transform itself into a new form of consciousness. The synthesis is at a higher level of truth than the first two views. Hegel’s work is based on the idealistic concept of a universal mind that, through evolution, seeks to arrive at the highest level of self-awareness and freedom.

In turn, the German social and political theorist Karl Marx famously applied the concept of dialectic to social and economic processes. He conceived historical progress as a matter of the development of technology (of human “productive forces”) to the point where this development came into contradiction with the existing system of ownership and exchange of land, labour, and goods (the existing “social relations of production”). At this point the contradiction takes the form of a struggle for power between two classes, one of which represents the development of the productive forces, and the other the maintenance of the existing social relations of production. The former eventually succeeds in overthrowing the latter in a revolution, so that the development of the productive forces can continue. Thus history as a whole has a dialectical movement. Progress towards human mastery over nature, and eventually towards the elimination of all class relations, results from the development and resolution of contradictions. In his later work Das Kapital (vol. 1, 1867; vols. 2 and 3, 1885 and 1894 respectively; trans. 1907-1909), Marx applied the idea of dialectic in a different way, in order to give a systematic account of the modern, capitalist system of social relations of production. Starting with the simplest of these relations (the exchange of commodities in the market), Marx attempted to show that, through a process of the development and resolution of internal contradictions, this relation must give rise in turn to all the remaining social relations of production of capitalism.

Marx described Hegel’s dialectical method as “idealist” since it was concerned with concepts and forms of consciousness. By contrast he saw his own dialectic as materialist since it dealt with techniques of material production and with the social relations necessitated by those techniques. Marx’s friend, Friedrich Engels, attempted to generalize Marx’s dialectical method into a general philosophy of “dialectical materialism”, and to formulate the “laws of dialectics” governing all change in the natural world as well as the social world. In later orthodox Marxist thought, “dialectic” often came to mean nothing more than a relation between two processes in which each act backs on to the other. However, some 20th-century Western European Marxists, such as Theodor Adorno, attempted to return to the Hegelian notion of dialectic. They saw it as a process of making explicit contradictions within an existing form of social consciousness in order to criticize it from within, rather than from a standpoint outside it.