dialectics

We explain what dialectics is in philosophy and how this concept was changing from Antiquity to the 20th century.

Heraclitus valued the dynamics that contradictions bring to thought.

What is dialectics?

Dialectics is a philosophical concept whose meaning has varied enormously throughout the world. weather and of the history.

As its etymological origin reveals (from ancient Greek dialektiké, "Conversation technique"), originally referred to a method from argumentation and verbal opposition of ideas very similar to what we understand today as logic.

The dialectic thus understood could be applied to different fields of the nature, the thought and the life. It constituted a method debate and research. Thus, there was a Platonic dialectic, which constituted his specific way of philosophizing and reasoning, for example.

The father of this original dialectic in Ancient Greece was Heraclitus (540-480 BC). For this philosopher the contradictions in thought, far from hindering it, made it more dynamic, since things, according to him, push each other in their opposition, being the negation of the other.

Thus, Heraclitus could think things from his metaphor of the river: “it is not possible to bathe twice in the same river”, which indicates that things constantly change in their stay: it is the same river, but at the same time it is not. That was his particular dialectic.

However, from the 18th century on, the term dialectic acquired a new meaning, thanks to the contributions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). This German philosopher argued that reality was made up of opposites, whose conflict It thus engendered new concepts that, upon entering reality, again come into conflict with something that opposes them.

Thus, thanks to Hegel, the term dialectic came to name those discourses in which it is opposed:

  • Thesis. A traditional conception.
  • Antithesis. A demonstration of their problems and contradictions.
  • Synthesis. The new understanding of the problem, which is reached from the contrast of the first two.

This type of reasoning developed by Hegel, it was later taken up by Karl Marx (1818-1883) in his interpretations of history and the society, and henceforth other distinguished Western thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), among others.

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