Discourse regarding Hegel's dialectic

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I am a brand new member of this site and am hoping to find an embracing community of people who can help me, as I will help them, discover the many aspects of philosophy. If anyone can give me directions to a basic overview of the functions, forums and benefits of this site, it would be greatly appreciated. I have many questions and discussions at my disposal and will be using this site as my main tool for exploiting them. My first questions is regarding the Hegelian dialectic.

I am a University student going into my first year of studies in Canada. I have been studying Philosophy vigorously for the past year and a half of my life and have discovered my favorites; Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel. I am also very familiar with Descartes, Sartre, Marx, Locke, Hobbes, Husserl, Camus, Kierkegaard, Rousseau and Heidegger. I have only recently begun to investigate the metaphysics of Hegel. I have taken great interest in metaphysics and epistemology; especially German Idealism entirely. In accordance, I have run into a few upsetting drawbacks when creating my own personal conclusions and opinions regarding Hegel’s dialectic, for which I hope to engage in meaningful discourse between the members of this site.

The personal confusions regarding the Hegelian dialectic deal with the self-sublation of being and nothingness synthesizing into something and how Hegel places this synthesis as an event in time. Hegel also says an eventual regression to ‘everythingness’ will self-sublate itself back into nothingness. Hegel also says that a synthesis is always “higher” or “richer” than the parent theses and anti-theses of the ones before it. I have several questions regarding these issues.

  1. How can the synthesis of being (undefined content as a presence) and nothingness (undefined content as an absence) be synthesized into something/existence as an event in time when space and time were not yet existent?

  2. Is the eventual regression into ‘everythingness’ a possibility? Is it possible for a thesis to be finite in which it is universal and defines everything in existence?

  3. How can Hegel denote the synthesis of a thesis and anti-thesis as “higher” or “richer” than the last theses when the only way to fully make something determinate/existent/characterized is to expose its own anti-thesis(which leads to a perpetual regression) ?

  4. Have I confused ‘everythingness’ as a finite universality when it also characterizes the same definition of being? How can everythingness (a presence of everything finite) eventually come to a moment in time where it self-sublates itself to its anti-thesis (an absence of everything finite) and create some sort of synthseis?

These are my confusions regarding the Hegelian dialectic and am looking forward to your responses. Please no trolls, only serious replies will be appreciated. Thank you.

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I don’t recall Hegel talking much about time. Give me some references or quote here to where he discussed the nature or logic of time and or space, for a reference, for what you mean here? In general though, you should remember that for Hegel, the negative dialectic should be thought of as the exact opposite of the empirically demonstrable: empiricism is going to “prove” something by demonstrating and re-creating it ‘objectively’, which implies an always-already accepted and given-unquestioned context, set of definitions and meanings, and “physical” (materialistic) world-space in which empirical acts take in possible meaning; the opposite of this is the Mental or for Hegel, “Concept” space, where space and time do not really exist. This is what universality and totality mean, that a true idea existed independent of space and time parameters. An idea, a truth, a concept, or for Plato a Form, basically anything universal, is going to exist “all at once” and regardless if we can point to this or that particular manifestation of it in space and time, such as perhaps within a given text or even in someone’s thoughts.

Basically, Hegel was right that we do not “prove” ideas or Concepts to ourselves in anything like the same way that scientists “prove” things to themselves by empirical demonstration. Therefore scientific materialism fails to hold to a philosophical standard.

Time and space do not take on absolute meaning, they are derived from the infinite. Remember too that Hegel was building from Kant and rather than employing absolute categories he wanted to unite differences into a single unity. That unity is simply thought itself, which means that from which (true, real) thought in fact comes, which is the universal, the absolute, the infinite, “God”, etc…

I don’t think so, no.

This is actually not true, because the general trend of beings is toward universality/infinitude and away from particularity/finitude. This is simply because Hegel uses a reality standard that is entirely non-material, non-reductive, and instead focuses on the fact that “self-determining” is the primary logic of reality… any thing which more is self-determined rather than determined by its relations to other things, is by definition more real, for Hegel.

Reality is always working to transcend itself, therefore every object or thing in reality, every being, is in a particular stage of self-transcendence away from finitude/particularity and toward infinitude/universality. In this way it is literally becoming more real. The dialectic synthesis of thesis and antithesis is a process whereby this transcendence occurs: the antithesis element reflects the (finite) limitation of a given thesis (positive substance or content toward transcendence), therefore when the two are incorporated the finite element is subjected to transcendent logic whereby its limitation is sublated in a given relevant unlimitation. The antithesis of any thesis is going to act as a finite limit or “repressed truth” which needs to be incorporated back within the thesis element from which it is in fact a part and to which it is in fact related authentically or primarily, even as antithetically.

The thetical is negated dialectically in the antithetical; aufheben, a kind of “catharsis” of what was in fact the true reality that was formerly masked in the thesis (“ideology”, image, etc.) and needed to be negated.

Yes this is problematic. But you should remember that the Absolute is, for Hegel, entirely mental. The mind is a fundamental reality, similar to Plato and his Forms/Ideas; comprehension is the end-result as well as the totality toward which everything, the entire universe, is always striving. Can you further define “everythingness” (not sure that I’ve seen this term in Hegel before) as you mean it here?

If you are juxtaposing everythingness with nothingness, then I would say that nothingness is logically impossible, necessarily, therefore “everythingness” is logically given, considering there is a necessary mutual opposition and exclusivity between the two ideas. Either there is nothing, or there is something; if there is something, which there is, then there is also “everything” which is simply the idea of the Totality of all somethings. And it isn’t as if every “something” is striving together in some kind of totality toward unification into an everything, but that the simply fact that a something is something, its ‘being qua being’, means necessarily that a process of self-transcendence is both immanent and forthcoming; that all beings share in this essential property, and therefore are both “isomorphic” to each other as well as composed quite literally out of the same (“mental”) substance, therefore even where different, are the same.

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Thesis: 2+2=4
Anti-thesis: 2+2 ≠ 4
Synthesis: 2+2 = sort of 4.

Thesis: Time is the measure of relative change
Anti-thesis: Time is not the measure of change
Synthesis: Time is partially the measure of relative change.

Thesis: A is A
Antithesis: A is not A
Synthesis: A is more or less A

Hmm… :-k

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Hegel’s dialectic is a method of knowledge, a process, a self-motion of thinking and reality, the tread of the spirit (Geist) to its self-knowledge.

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Philosophically said, the Marxistic communism, which is based on Hegel’s dialectic, says that the capitalism is the thesis, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the antithesis, and classless equality and equal happiness for all is the synthesis. But if is right that history is class struggle (war), then it is not - or at least only without history - possible to get a classless equality and equal happiness for all. Okay, Hegel already claimed the end of history, also Marx who was a Left-Hegelian, and many others (mostly Hegelians, some Nietzscheans, some others). So, as long as there is history there is no classless equality and equal happiness for all, so that the classes, the inequality, thus the class struggle (war) remain.

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Now, because there is not less but more war (=> history), the conclusion must be either (a) the trial to finish history or (b) the search for other solutions. Ending history is theoretically possible. Maybe the machines, the genetic engineering, and the cyborgization will lead us to the capability of ending history practically in the future. At the moment there is more war than ever before.

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By the way: One can try to apply the dialectic process to Hegel’s dialectic itself. If we say that Hegel’s dialectic is anti-analytic and the analytic philosophy anti-dialectic, then there are thesis and antithesis in two ways, but we do not really know which one of them starts at first as thesis. Starting at first is an advantage. So which one is the one with that advantage? If we will never know this, then we will have to state that both remain just opposites, because it would be unfair to say this or that one starts at first. But, in that case, it is also problematic to say what the synthesis is. The first one (thesis) with the advantage will always say that the second one (antithesis) is somehow "false“ or "evil“, so that the first one will always make a major contribution to the synthesis.

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War requires weapons. Either they are part of the body, or they need to be made resp. bought from someone else. So war is a business too. This means that war becomes more and more lucrative and that nobody of the big war business has an interest in giving it up.

Especially in modern times the contradiction between the war business of a very few people and the wish of living in peace and harmony of the most people is very obvious. So the rhetorical lies are on top, since the few people of the war business are powerful, whereas the most people are powerless.

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One of the most interesting questions is: What was first: war and disharmony or peace and harmony?

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My point is that it is not theoretically decidable who is on first, because, apparently, that decision is given by history (resp. evolution) itself, and that means by powerful people (resp. nature).

Dialectic processes are not nonsense, because they really happen. So they are, philosophically said, ontological, thus not only logical.

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Neither came first. There was no first.

Is there a difference between Hegel’s “dialectic” and “compromise”?

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There is no first , but there is prior, a-Priori, Which signifies the source of thought as deriving from deduction or observation.

Even if observation precedes a deduction, there no method to determine in the sense of temporal succession.

However, the connotative derivation obfuscates this distinction.

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Compromise, yes, and the result of war or of struggle can also be interpreted as compromise.

But it would still be interesting to know the first one …, if there was one.

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I believe to understand philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and their likes one would need to read their core texts at least 50 times and spent at least one year full time on each of the main text. I have done that with Kant but not Hegel (read twice {long time ago} his The Phenomenology of Spirit). So I not fully familiar with Hegel but nevertheless my views are;

I would wonder as well how can an event-in-time exist without time and space. Perhaps you could provide the reference from Hegel. It is likely there is more to it than such a contradictory presentation.
One possibility is the transcendence of time, note points below.

It is not a regresssion but a dynamic complementarity spiralling into infinity.

It is a shift in perspective.
Thesis: A piece of diamond is hard [not penetrable].
Anti-thesis: A piece of diamond is soft [penetrable with an electron knife]
Synthesis: A piece of diamond is both hard and soft.

A “higher” or “richer” perspective is when one is able to toggle spirally to and from between thesis and anti-thesis as reality.

The danger is the conflation of the thesis and anti-thesis within one perspective only or within one sense only.
The point is to view
A = A
A = not-A
from a helicopter view to understand their different perspectives and conditions.

Note ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is Form’ - Heart Sutra
answers.yahoo.com/question/inde … 018AAdDOI0
or
Everything is nothingness, nothingness is everything.

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But most humans always place something (e.g. “Big Bang”) or someone (e.g. God) at the beginning. So according to most humans this placed one came first. Let us take the following example for a dialectic process in a religious and theological sense: (1) the thesis God came first, (2) the antithesis Devil was the second one who came, (3) the synthesis Man came as the thrid one. If we exchange the first one (thesis God) and and the second one (antithesis Devil) for each other, then we will pretty soon notice that the third one (synthesis Man) would have other properties than in the first example.

So we better should assume that there was neither a first one nor a second one, but both existed already at that time which we want to be the first time or the beginning of time?!?. They were, are, and will be in conflict with each other. And it is up to the third one - the synthesis - (as “the smiling third”? :slight_smile: ) to make the best of it, e.g. to gain from the polemic, the struggle, the war of the first and the second one?!?. Good for the human rulers … :wink:

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Yes, and this is why , at times, 'most humans’are ignorant of what really is going on, and bemone the fact, that in the end it is they who have to pay the price. Am sticking to the script in the terms of philosophical discourse, and the price need not contain minimally, anything other then merely ‘logical inconsistency’

For those who aspire higher, numbers are not challenging, because that is all they are, another form of representation: accounting. Accounting is many things besides the numerical quantifying of facts, it is also inserting reasons, (oh, much too fast)
to give credence, usually resulting in a very sloppy compromising situation, not at all what ‘they’ expected.

But I know this is tangential and perhaps an unsatisfactory answer.

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If you have made the Hegel’s dialectic your own and are powerful enough, then you can do with the less powerful people whatever you want. You just play the historical game called “dialectic process” by using them like chess-men.

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Another possibility is to give the advantage to the second one, the antithesis, for example to the dictatorship of the proletariat - as we know not only from history. Principally, everyone and not only egalitarianists like the communists, can “argue” in this way.

In this example, the (advocates of the) unproductives ones “argue” as if they were the (advocates of the) productive ones, and the (advocates of the) real poroductive ones argue in the same way: They are exploited. But only the productive ones are right, because they (and only they!) pay taxes, and, moreover, the unproductive ones are paid by this taxes. The taxpayers (and only the taxpayers) are exploited by those who do not pay taxes, and this are not only poor people but also very rich people.

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No wonder the vocal school of the Viennese Circle was overcome by the British Positivists to settle this for once and for all.

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The Wiener Kreis (Vienese Circle) and the Berliner Kreis (Berlinese Circle, a.k.a. Berliner Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie) founded the Neupositivismus (Neopositivism).