Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In its most general sense, dialectic has come to signify any more or less intricate process of conceptual or social conflict, interconnection and change, in which the generation, interpenetration and clash of oppositions, leading to their transcendence in a fuller or more adequate mode of thought or form of life, plays a key role. But dialectic is one of the oldest, most complex and contested concepts in philosophical and social thought. Controversy in the twentieth century has, however, revolved around the nineteenth-century figures of Hegel and Marx. There are two inflections of the dialectic in Hegel: (a) as a logical process; (b) more narrowly, as the dynamo of this process. (a)  In Hegel the principle of idealism, the speculative understanding of reality as (absolute) spirit, unites two ancient strands of dialectic, the Eleatic idea of dialectic as reason and the Ionian idea of dialectic as process , in the notion of dialectic as a self-generating, self-differentiating and self-particularizing process of reason . This actualizes itself by alienating itself, and restores its self-unity by recognizing this alienation as nothing other than its own free expression or manifestation – a process which is recapitulated and completed in the Hegelian System itself. (b)  The motor of this process is dialectic more narrowly conceived, the second, essentially negative, moment of ‘actual ... log in or subscribe to read full text