The word comes from Greek dialegesthai, to converse: for Socrates and Plato, dialectic is the art of question and answer. Immanuel Kant used “dialectic” for reason’s illusions when it overreaches.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel transformed it: each concept or form of life, thought through, reveals an inner contradiction that drives it beyond itself, to be aufgehoben — cancelled, preserved and raised up at once.
Karl Marx turned it into dialectical materialism. Søren Kierkegaard opposed it with an “either/or” — some choices cannot be mediated.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalAufheben
Origin. Hegel’s key dialectical verb, exploiting the triple meaning of the German word. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
For progress that keeps what it overcomes.
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related by shared connectionsPhenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s first masterpiece — the “voyage of discovery” of consciousness through sense-certainty, self-consciousness, reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowing.
German Idealism
The extraordinary philosophical movement after Kant — Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — that tried to complete his revolution by showing reality itself to be the work of mind or Spirit.
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
Karl Marx
Philosopher, economist and revolutionary who turned Hegel’s dialectic into historical materialism — the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
The Leap of Faith
Kierkegaard’s claim that faith cannot be reached by reasoning — it is a passionate decision made in the face of the absurd.
What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?
Can reason know everything — or are there things the mind can never reach? From the Upanishads’ unknowable knower to Kant’s boundary and Wittgenstein’s silence.