Abstract
In Hegel’s dialectical logic, arguments never come to an end, and continuing them often results in proving consequences contrary to what was proved before: by continuing an argument that proves the mortality of Socrates, we may end up proving his immortality. Since not even contrariety can determine radical differences, those who reason according to this logic (like Hegel himself) have a tendency to deny such differences, and to think of world history as a single connected narrative—they have a tendency to monism. But note that, insofar as the word “narrative” is suggestive of a temporal development, this suggestion must be resisted: that one thing follows another in time must still be explained logically; history itself must turn from chronicle to demonstration. Time presents us with the immediacy of dialectical development; but this immediacy must be redeemed by being mediated conceptually; time parameters are promissory notes to be paid off by providing an account of why certain things did not just follow but had to follow certain other things—at which point the time parameters can be dispensed with.
Optimism is also naturally forthcoming in this framework, not so much because a point of view is available which is external to the narrative and argues for a positive resolution of it as rather because each phase of the narrative can only be spelling out its own (internal) values and seeing them reflected in the ways in which that phase is in fact turning out. On the other hand, dialectical logic cannot be formalized, because the whole context in which an argument is phrased (which, tendentially, is really the whole context) must always remain available for the next steps of the argument to be made. No abstraction from content is ever going to be legitimate.
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Notes
- 1.
In my 2000 I claim that Hegel’s main contribution to philosophy, whatever the ostensible subject matter he was at any time dealing with, was how he thought, reasoned, and argued about it, rather than any substantive thesis he might have had about it. Hegel himself did not always explicitly put it that way, and in any case reserved specific treatises to an account of his logic. The two major ones are the Science of Logic (1990) and the The Encyclopaedia Logic (1991a).
- 2.
A point that will surface repeatedly in what follows but can already be stated here is the following: stories are told about what has already happened (even those that are told about what is now the future must be told from a position in which what is now the future is past, or at least present). Which accounts for dialectical logic’s essentially retrospective stance and (as I explain in my 2000) provides the only plausible way of understanding Hegel’s repeated claims of being at the end of history—which would otherwise sound ludicrous.
- 3.
“Those who say … [choice] is appetite or anger or wish or a kind of opinion do not seem to be right. For choice is not common to irrational creatures as well but appetite and anger are…. But neither is it wish, though it seems near to it, for choice cannot relate to impossibles, and if any one said he chose them he would be thought silly; but there may be a wish even for impossibles, e.g. for immortality…. For this reason, too, it cannot be opinion; for opinion is thought to relate to all kinds of things, no less to eternal things and impossible things than to things in our own power; and it is distinguished by its falsity and truth, not by its badness or goodness, while choice is distinguished rather by these” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1111b).
- 4.
For this understanding of Kant’s key term “transcendental,” see my (1987).
- 5.
Philosophy has traditionally been associated with, even defined as, meditation upon death, or consolation of death, or in any case a focus on death. (It was only in the twentieth century that Hannah Arendt suggested a philosophy centered on birth.) So it might be instructive to notice in passing (and consistently with claims I have already made, and will continue to make) that there may be a logical angle to that obsession: death is where the radical divisions required by analytic logic apply most obviously. Conversely, one might regard dialectical logic as a logic of life (and indeed Hegel sees life as the immediacy of the idea—as the dialectical idea simply showing up).
- 6.
“For assume that composite substances do not consist of simple parts: then, if all composition is removed in thought, no composite part, and (since there are no simple parts) no simple part, thus nothing at all would be left over; consequently, no substance would be given” (1998, A434/B462).
- 7.
“We can now define the momentary common-sense ‘thing,’ as opposed to its momentary appearances. By the similarity of neighboring perspectives, many objects in the one can be correlated with objects in the other, namely with the similar objects. Given an object in one perspective, form the system of all the objects correlated with it in all the perspectives; that system may be identified with the momentary common-sense ‘thing.’ Thus an aspect of a ‘thing’ is a member of the system of aspects which is the ‘thing’ at that moment…. All the aspects of a thing are real, whereas the thing is a merely logical construction” (1914, p. 96).
- 8.
This conviction extends to many supporters of empirical (as opposed to logical) evolutionary views. Near the end of his (1996), for example, Charles Darwin says: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (p. 395). The way the necessity of dialectical optimism is justified below could shed some light on such sanguine (and, as seen from the outside, indefensible) pronouncements.
- 9.
“This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance itself as far as possible from the obligation to construct a state as it ought to be; such instruction as it may contain cannot be aimed at instructing the state on how it ought to be, but rather at showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be recognized…. To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason. As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over Rhodes. If his theory does indeed transcend his own time, if it builds itself a world as it ought to be, then it certainly has an existence, but only within his opinions—a pliant medium in which the imagination can construct anything it pleases” (1991b, pp. 21–22).
- 10.
“[T]he essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘concept’ and ‘object,’ ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself,’ both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating. Consequently, we do not need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas and thoughts during the course of the inquiry; it is precisely when we leave these aside that we succeed in contemplating the matter in hand as it is in and for itself” (1977b, pp. 53–54; translation modified).
- 11.
See for example his (1991a), p. 151.
- 12.
More detail about this issue can be found in my (2015).
- 13.
“It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: ‘This,’ i.e. the universal This; or, ‘it is,’ i.e. Being in general. Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say. But language, as we see, is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean” (1977b, p. 60).
- 14.
The only exceptions are “world-historical individuals” like Napoleon. In a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer on October 13, 1806, Hegel writes: “the emperor—this world soul—I saw riding out through the city reconnoitering;—it is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and dominates it” (1984, p. 114). And in (1991c) he explains: “World-historical men—the Heroes of an epoch—must, therefore, be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others. Whatever prudent designs and counsels they might have learned from others, would be the more limited and inconsistent features in their career; for it was they who best understood affairs; from whom others learned, and approved, or at least acquiesced in—their policy. For that Spirit which had taken this fresh step in history is the inmost soul of all individuals; but in a state of unconsciousness which the great men in question aroused. Their fellows, therefore, follow these soul-leaders; for they feel the irresistible power of their own inner Spirit thus embodied. If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit—we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nought else but their master-passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar; transported to St. Helena, like Napoleon” (pp. 30–31).
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Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Interlude: A Conversation Between Two Dialectical Neighbors
Interlude: A Conversation Between Two Dialectical Neighbors
- Jack::
-
Hi Don. How are you doing?
- Don::
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Just the person I was looking for. I need to talk to you.
- Jack::
-
What about?
- Don::
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It’s about our backyards. See, it’s been a while since we moved in…
- Jack::
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A couple of months.
- Don::
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Indeed, and so far we have been leaving everything open. Anyone can just wander back and forth between your property and mine.
- Jack::
-
Is there anything wrong with that?
- Don::
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Yes, I think a lot is wrong with that. We should build a fence and share the expense.
- Jack::
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That’s some news. Why would I want to do that? I like the open space. I like the view. Why would I want to shut myself up in a cage?
- Don::
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Actually, that would not be shutting yourself up. It would be liberating yourself.
- Jack::
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What do you mean?
- Don::
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Think of when we were hunter-gatherers, hundreds of thousands of years ago. We went around in small groups and there was nothing impeding our march. No walls, no barriers, no fences. Except for natural obstacles, we were entirely free to roam the territory in any direction we pleased.
- Jack::
-
You are starting your own march from way back in the past. What do prehistoric humans have to do with us?
- Don::
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A lot, as you will see. So these individuals were free to go and to stay wherever they wanted. They were also free to be attacked by other groups of hunter-gatherers and slaughtered, perhaps at night, when they were asleep, when they were helpless prey. They were free to eat what they caught, and free to starve when they caught nothing.
- Jack::
-
Just as everyone today is free to buy a ten-million-dollar mansion, though most don’t have the money for it.
- Don::
-
Precisely: it’s the same issue. This notion of freedom is too primitive, in a literal sense. There is nothing wrong with it, at the stage of the hunter-gatherers; but then people start thinking about it and they realize that they are, for all intents and purposes, drastically caged in. Not by walls or fences but by their precarious situation, by the deadly risks they constantly encounter, by the need to constantly defend themselves, by their constant fear.
- Jack::
-
A psychological cage.
- Don::
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Yes, and a more effective one than anything physical. For you can break the bars of a physical cage, but from a psychological one you will never escape. It will always be blocking you, because it is inside you.
- Jack::
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I am not sure that physical bars can be broken down so easily. But keep going; I am curious to see where this takes you.
- Don::
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It takes me to a natural evolution of freedom. It turns out that people are more free, not less, when they restrict their original capacity to wander aimlessly and accept limitations in the spaces that belong to them, when they restrict their original capacity to make, at every moment, an arbitrary choice and subject their choices to agreements with their peers. Their freedom can best express itself only by incorporating these limitations, because now there are more things they in fact can do—including doing whatever they do in a safer environment, where it can be done better.
- Jack::
-
I sort of figured that you would get there. Now you are going to tell me that civilized humans have a more mature sort of freedom because they are integrated in a system of laws and a neat division of property that allows them to use what is uncontroversially their own in developing their own tastes and talents.
- Don::
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That’s what I would tell you if you didn’t already tell it yourself.
- Jack::
-
And, presumably, you are also going to tell me that each of us is going to be freer if we just as neatly divide our properties. That my primitive sense of openness must evolve in an openness to be found beyond the building of a fence, not before it.
- Don::
-
That’s right. Why do you think people say that good fences make good neighbors? Because all enjoy their homes more when their spaces are identified clearly; because it is easier to have healthy relations across a fence, free to choose when to make contact and when not to. Because that is what elementary, indefinite openness must graduate into: clarity. Just as a piece of writing is more open, it communicates more, when it abides by all the rules of spelling, and grammar, and syntax. To begin with, you may find those rules constraining—you certainly did as a child, when you were forced to learn them—but that very constraint is what ultimately frees your prose, frees you to write what you want to write, and to be understood by others. Even to be better understood by yourself.
- Jack::
-
Everything you said makes a lot of sense, so much that, as you have seen, I could say most of it myself, once I got the gist of it. I can do that because I have been there, because it is a path I have traveled, and in the houses I had before I was the one who went out and made the same speeches to my neighbors.
- Don::
-
Then we agree?
- Jack::
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Yes and no. I agree that you are on the right track, but I believe you are stopping too soon.
- Don::
-
Now it’s you who has to tell me what you mean.
- Jack::
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I’ll try. What you have done is show that things can turn into their opposites while still remaining themselves, indeed a better, more advanced form of themselves. A man who was short and weak as a child may turn into an adult that is no longer short and weak. A freedom that amounts to not knowing any rules or restrictions may turn into one that has accepted rules and restrictions, and that is more freedom because of that.
- Don::
-
Yes; this is what I have done. What’s wrong with it?
- Jack::
-
Nothing is wrong. It is perfectly right, as far as it goes. Except that it doesn’t quite go far enough. For the adult who is no longer short and weak is about ready to turn into an old man who is once more short and weak, though in a different way.
- Don::
-
And freedom?
- Jack::
-
Same thing, though it takes some effort, some ingenuity to see it. When you see it, on the other hand, it strikes you as the most natural thing in the world, the one you should have seen all along.
- Don::
-
Well, make me see it, then.
- Jack::
-
When you told your story, you ran together two distinct sorts of constraints: physical ones like fences (that supposedly make good neighbors) and legal ones like rules. So let me pick up the story where you left it off, and take it one or two stages further, so that you can see what I see now. In the old days of civilized humans, long after the hunter-gatherer era, physical barriers were predominant. People locked themselves in their fortresses, worried about venturing into alien territory, armed themselves to the teeth when they had to.
- Don::
-
Some still do.
- Jack::
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Yes, and why? Because they don’t trust the institutions, so they revert to the past. But they cannot live in the past; they must get on with the present, with the new ways things are turning out.
- Don::
-
And if they don’t?
- Jack::
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They will be left behind. They will be the pitiful leftovers of a bygone time.
- Don::
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I don’t know that they care.
- Jack::
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That’s why they are pitiful leftovers. But forget about them. My point is that eventually the constraints, the “cages” that proved more liberating were found to be the legal ones, since they allowed a new form of wandering around, at the same time unimpeded and secure.
- Don::
-
What are you talking about?
- Jack::
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I am talking about all the public spaces that have opened up as civilization progressed. I am talking about parks, roads, squares, sidewalks. All places where people are restrained not by physical barriers but by the respect for each other that the laws require. So that they can go and stay wherever they please, like those cavemen you were talking about, without being afraid of others doing violence to them.
- Don::
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Sometimes they do.
- Jack::
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Sure: a growth process is not painless, and is not victimless. But it is also unstoppable.
- Don::
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You are quite the optimist.
- Jack::
-
It’s not my personal sentiments that matter. It is the logic of evolution itself, as much of social evolution as of the biological variety.
- Don::
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I’m fine with everything you said; but I still don’t see how it relates to our situation. We are not talking about public spaces here; we are talking about private ones, about my property and yours.
- Jack::
-
That’s what I thought until a few years ago, and that’s why I did have fences in those other houses. But then I realized that I had to go one step further. Public spaces are constituted by having everyone agree to leave them public, so there is no reason why two people like you and me could not agree to leave part of our spaces public, thus obtaining the same combination of liberty and security that people have on streets and sidewalks.
- Don::
-
I guess that pretty soon you’d want to make the insides of our houses into public spaces too.
- Jack::
-
Why not? That might be the next step. But progress is made one step at a time, so for the moment let’s just enjoy the new phase of freedom our open backyards give us.
- Don::
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I don’t enjoy any of it. I don’t enjoy your dog getting on this side and scaring my guests; I don’t enjoy you watching me whatever I am doing; I don’t enjoy the fact that someone might rob your house and then, finding no barrier between us, rob mine as well.
- Jack::
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That’s exactly as it should be. You should not enjoy any of that. Didn’t I tell you that there are going to be growing pains?
- Don::
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Who decides that these are growing pains? Why couldn’t it be instead that you have been left behind by history, that you are a pitiful leftover overwhelmed by nostalgia, craving for a primitive sort of freedom? Why shouldn’t I push you along, make you get on with the present, with how things are turning out?
- Jack::
-
So you didn’t find my explanation irresistible, unobjectionable?
- Don::
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It’s irresistible and unobjectionable from where you are sitting. From my point of view, it is just as irresistible and unobjectionable to claim that you should yourself take one or two steps forward.
- Jack::
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But my account incorporates your point of view, just as your freedom incorporated limitations. So, in the same way, my account is a more mature development of yours, more up to date.
- Don::
-
Jack, this is a game that two can play. I can insist that your alleged “more mature” development is really only a reiteration of an obsolete stance, which takes itself to be more mature simply because it does not know any better: everyone can do nothing other than play out its own perspective, and what values are dominant in it. Or I can continue your story, add a new chapter: the one in which freedom goes back to requiring physical constraints.
- Jack::
-
I would love to hear that.
- Don::
-
You have been describing your position as the most novel, so novel that you are one of the few who arrived at it—one of the charismatic, historical individuals who point the way of the future. But to me that same position sounds outdated, a remnant from an earlier age. In the sixties and seventies of the last century, people had already gotten there: they lived in communes, they worked in offices without walls, and they thought that this would make them freer and merrier. When it didn’t, when it started creating all sorts of problems, they understood something important and made another step: they realized that public spaces are liberating because we can decide when to enter them, and we can alternate between them and private ones. We can leave our private offices to go into a public area; we can leave our private houses to see friends in a coffee shop. We don’t have to live in a coffee shop; we don’t have to stand the presence of others if we don’t want to. Privacy is what confers value on publicity. The new phase of freedom is, so to speak, freedom-square, metafreedom: the freedom of choosing between private freedom and public freedom.
- Jack::
-
That’s ingenious. But don’t you think that I could add a new chapter too?
- Don::
-
I’m sure you could. But I’m also sure you see that we could go on like this forever and the fence would never get built.
- Jack::
-
It would be built in a chapter and taken down in the next.
- Don::
-
And it would cost ten times more than just building it once and being done with it.
- Jack::
-
What is money if not the public circulation of goods?
- Don::
-
So do you want to make your money public, to share it with me?
- Jack::
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Why not? Wouldn’t you find that liberating?
- Don::
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Not at the stage at which I currently am, not if that means that I have to share my money with you, or with anyone else that comes around. But I see that you and I are out of sync, that our stages of development are. I should talk to you again when you have made some progress in your intellectual development.
- Jack::
-
Or when you have.
- Don::
-
This is hopeless, Jack. Perhaps I need to build my own fence in my own property, to express my own stage of development.
- Jack::
-
Perhaps you need to do that, and then tear it down later.
- Don::
-
Or wait until you will want to pay your share of it.
- Jack::
-
Because I have finally reached your stage?
- Don::
-
Yes, because you have grown out of your childish pretences.
- Jack::
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It’s totally arbitrary for you to call me childish. That judgment is internal to your view, and totally superseded in mine.
- Don::
-
OK, so I am going to go inside now and write the ultimate story, the one that incorporates everything that you have said, everything that you now think, every argument you could possibly use, and when you read it you will have to agree that that is the truth of it—the truth of what you yourself are now claiming.
- Jack::
-
But not the truth my story will prove, the one I am going to write, incorporating that very agreement as an early chapter.
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Bencivenga, E. (2017). Dialectical Logic. In: Theories of the Logos. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63396-1_3
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