Chapter 4/8

“The Dialectic Is Logical, Ontological, and Historical.”

Before we leave the philosophers and go back to the world the rest of us live in, we need to look at one more of them, Georg W. F. Hegel. (With Hegel, we must slow our reading down and study carefully, think about what he has to say.) Hegel believed that the DIALECTIC is what everything is all about. Specifically, he said, “The dialectic is logical, ontological, and historical”; it is how our minds work, what is fundamentally and ultimately real, and how all history moves. Everything is DIALECTICal (thus, the DIALECTIC is the only way to understand anything).

Not only did Hegel believe that all reality is DIALECTICal, he also systematized it, reduced it to a logical order, an order that always involved three processive elements.

I suggest you now find a blank sheet of paper and draw a triangle–one line across the base with two lines converging to a point at the top. Hegel thought in such triangular patterns, or as he called them, triads. Think of the bottom left corner as the starting point of your thinking, action, or understanding, the place you hold to, where you take your stand, what you believe or plan or hope for.

This position, Hegel called, your thesis. It might be anything from your income to your job or hobby. It could be spiritualism, surgery, snack food, the school board, or anything else that might be the starting point–the thesis–for your thought.

Now look to the bottom right corner of the triangle. Hegel called this the anti-thesis. By this he meant anything that stands apart from your basic thesis. It could be its enemy, its opposite, or merely something left out or ignored by the thesis. It is something to be considered over and against your thesis.

Suppose, for instance, your thesis is an illness for which the doctor has recommended surgery. The surgery is scheduled and seems to be the best course of action. On the other hand, you are uneasy about going under the knife, and there are medicines that sometimes take care of the problem without resort to surgery. This medicine would be an antithesis to surgery. (Ordinarily, there are many antitheses although only one or two may be significant.)

Again, acupuncture might be a promising option, another antithesis to consider. You may imagine other possible antitheses to surgery, including foregoing the operation and taking your chances without medical treatment.