Hegelian Dialectics

Abstract

This article is an attempt to trace the development of modern dialectics. George W.F. Hegel brought the method of dialectics to fruition through an analysis of the history of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and ‘Oriental’ thought, before traversing the various stages which would eventually culminate in the philosophy of Hegel himself. The author of this article concentrates on the modern epoch in particular, whereby the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume are opposed by Kant. Subsequently Kant is fiercely critiqued, by Fichte and Schelling among others, and the Hegelian philosophy emerges, to some extent, as the critique of this critique. Dialectics is the method of Marxism but it is the contention of the author that dialectical materialism (Marxism) cannot be appreciated without reference to Hegel, who was the first thinker to consciously apprehend the movement and interconnection of both thought and being – as totality. Marx made reference to Hegel as ‘that mighty thinker’ in the preface to his Magnus opus while Lenin was later to comment that it is impossible to understand Das Capital without ‘having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's logic’. There is certainly a great deal of difference between Hegel and Marx but dialectics is the method, the thread, which runs through both.