Defining the Term "Dialectic"

My History with a Slippery Term

I distinctly remember first encountering the word “dialectic” as a middle-schooler, in the Christian liberal arts curriculum my parents used to teach us the humanities. The program was divided up into four levels: lower grammar, upper grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. Moreover, part of the curriculum were a series of original dialogues intended to introduced upper level students to the study of philosophy. I don’t recall the details (and am slightly afraid to revisiting them with what I know now), but in each dialogue Simplicio would interrogate a figure from contemporary philosophy, with the upshot of the dialogue pointing to the normative evaluation one should have of that figure from the perspective of a “Christian worldview.” At least one of the dialogues (probably dedicated to Marx or Hegel) explicitly attempted, through conversation, to define the word “dialectic.”

Looking back, this was one of the key moments of my education - another instance would be “the analogy of being” in a course on Aquinas at Hillsdale College - which was marked by a stubborn refusal to pretend I understood an important term, a stubborn refusal which would launch years of intellectual development.

Admitting you haven’t yet fully grasped the meaning of a term basic to your discipline can be the sign of a real philosophical mind. For presumably, a discipline’s key terms are infinitely rich in meaning, and attempts to re-grasp such terms at their root are the kind of fundamental thinking which accompanies every important development in the field.

But in an academic setting it is a vulnerable confession, running the risk of appearing to lag behind those who work with labels rather than thoughts, or who are content with one-sided definitions.

I didn’t know what the term dialectic could mean. It seemed to have something to do with exchange in conversation also the necessary unfolding of history (I had only caricatures of Marx and Hegel), and maybe logical opposites? Honestly, I’m not sure I had yet grasped the last point at all. But I couldn’t see how these associations held together, and I didn’t see what any of them had to do with the third “stage” of my humanities curriculum.

My confusion persisted well into my time in grad school, long after I had encountered the works of Plato, Marx, and Hegel first hand. How could “dialectic” name the method of these disparate thinkers? Things were not improved by my entry into the world of theology, where the term seems primarily to pick out the thought of the early Karl Barth, and thus a sharp opposition between God and creatures.

How could the conversational play of the Phaedrus and the headache-inducing transitions of the Logic come under a single term? Is dialectic the play of words or a metaphysical thesis? And what specifically was bad about dialectic? For that it was bad or dangerous to Christian orthodoxy was constantly insinuated. But was it bad because it made God and world identical (the charge against Hegel’s “dialectical” thought)? Or was it bad because it made them absolutely different (the charge against Barth)?

It has only been with 1) my amateur interest in psychoanalysis, 2) my third cycle of Hegel obsession, and 3) my exposure to the Dalhousie school that I’m starting to get clear on what dialectic might mean. Not in the sense that its sense is exhaustively revealed, but that some underlying unity is coming to light.

Here are three brief attempts to express what I’ve found.

1. Dialectic is the Recognition of the Self in the Other

This is at once a dialogical practice and a historical, social, and psychological hermeneutic.

Why does Plato proceed conversationally? Because the position Socrates espouses not only emerges through confrontation with the (allegedly) opposing position of the interlocutor, but more profoundly reveals itself to be the truth of the interlocutor’s position, if upheld consistently. Socrates can recognize himself in the other, which is not simply narcissistic projection because its flip side in the impossibility of knowing one’s own position apart from wrestling and being wounded by what seems most opposite to it.

Hegel recognizes that a particular historical stage does not follow another through mere extrinsic and contingent sequence, but in some way takes up as its ownmost the contradiction that defined the last. Again, Marx sees alienated human labor in the commodity, and Freud sees my deepest unconscious desires in the dreams and slips of the tongue that seem most empty of meaning.

2. Dialectic Reverses the Exclusion of Contradiction from Being

The ontological basis of dialectic as a practice and hermeneutic is already signaled in the previous definition. Recognizing the self in the other is not just a way of engaging interlocutors or reading phenomena, but is a claim about otherness and identity. Namely, it is a recognition that identity is constituted by alterity, or non-identity, and that what is other is also in another moment the same. Of course, this raises the metaphysical problem of contradiction.

To think through the presuppositions of dialectic as a discursive practice or hermeneutic, it is necessary to overcome a metaphysical prejudice, which is that contradiction cannot exist objectively, but is solely a product of subjective distortion. When operating on the level of the ordinary reflective understanding (Verstand), we see contradiction in our thought as a sign that something has gone wrong on our end, producing a thought which is false. Or at best, contradiction might be a necessary evil accompanying our subjective perspective: what is itself unified and whole is fractured into opposing aspects in our engagement with it.

Dialectic as a metaphysical thesis is a qualification of the ultimacy of the Principal of Non-Contradiction, through the admission that being itself (and not just thought) admits of contradiction. Thought involves contradiction because it unfolds, rather than distorts, the order of being. Being contradicts itself in order to be itself, and every being is marked by a contradiction which makes it what it is.

In late Platonism, this means that multiplicity and contradiction are not just human artifacts, but reflect in some way the Dyad and the interplay of limit and the unlimited. Soul (with its contradictions) is not just subjective but is a level of being (even if excluded from the highest metaphysical plane).

The inclusion of contradiction in reality is, of course, most fully exposited by Hegel.

3. Dialectic is the staged incorporation of limited perspectives into the structure of totality/objectivity itself.

These first two definitions are related in another way. It is not just that dialectic, as a subjective practice (seeing the self in the other), leads us to an objective realization (contradiction is included in being). No; what dialectic reveals is that the play of “subjective” perspectives is constitutive of “objectivity” itself; totality only exists through the staged succession of partial views.

Hegel, like Socrates, is not the one who achieves a single panoptic standpoint, but the one who succeeds in denying such a single panoptic view without this implying a skeptical conclusion.

The thought of a particular thinker is dialectical if it has, internal to itself, multiple perspectives which are staged in a particular ordered relation. Take Eckhart for example: from one perspective God is Being, and the only real Being, but from another God is totally Beyond Being. From yet another perspective, God is the Trinitarian self-constitution of Being. None of these perspective are total; they are moments. These moments do not simply co-exist on a single plane, but interact in a specific way, passing into each other in a form or shape which is the figure’s distinctive profile. But there is no final perspective which leaves the moments behind. The totality is immanent to this perspectival multiplicity and its movement, and does not hover above it.

We must cease to long for a panoptic standpoint which would abolish the play of perspectives, and incorporate the perspectival into truth itself. This is the move from Kant to Hegel, and from the sophist to Plato.

Why so much trouble with the term “dialectic”? In part because particular thinkers have their own version, but more profoundly because it is constitutive of dialectic that it show us many faces. There is here, in the confusion and difference accompanying the term, a deeper coincidence of form and content. To a non-dialectical thinker, dialectic cannot be understood. And this will reflect back on those who think dialectically. Like Barth or Hegel on the God-world relation, they will be charged simultaneously with opposing errors.