Dialectic
(portrait by Jakob Schlesinger, 1831)
Dialectic (also dialectics; Greek: διαλεκτική (τέχνη) dialektiké (téchne) "art of conversation"; Latin: (ars) dialectica "(art) of conducting conversation") was in antiquity and the Middle Ages a method of verbal argumentation in philosophical and theological disputes based on strict logic. The founder of the dialectical method is said to have been Zeno of Elea. In the Middle Ages, together with grammar and rhetoric, it formed the trivium in the canon of the Seven Liberal Arts.
From the 18th century onwards, dialectics became more and more a philosophical method of thought for finding and overcoming the opposites in things and concepts by progressing from the thesis via the antithesis to the synthesis, in which the opposites were to be cancelled out on a higher level. This method was particularly brought to fruition by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
„This movement in pure concepts is now called the "dialectical method" in the sense of the great philosopher Hegel, whereby man lives only in concepts and makes himself capable of allowing one concept to emerge from another, to grow forth, as it were. Thus man lives in a sphere in which he refrains from the outer, sensuous world, and where he refrains from that which stands behind it, from the supersensuous world. The soul moves from concept to concept, and the force that drives it away from concept to concept lets the one concept emerge from the other. This method is called the dialectical method, the method of the self-moving concept.“ (Lit.:GA 108, p. 245)
See also
Literature
- Rudolf Steiner: Die Beantwortung von Welt- und Lebensfragen durch Anthroposophie, GA 108 (1986), ISBN 3-7274-1081-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
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