The question that remains is whether it's a good way to do that. It's not really an argument per se, it's a way to describe and understand reality. Which also undergoes a dialectical process.Īs for your second question, dialectic is a way to analyse ideas or historical processes. It's productive because it brings about a new idea, the idea of the general. But this negation is not just pure self-contradiction, it's also productive (hence 'determinate' negation). So inside the idea of the particular, there is its negation, the general. Because space and time are not merely objects, they're general conditions that render the existence of the particular possible. Each time you point to the particular, you assume that there is such a thing as a 'here' and a 'now' which are general. For example, if you say 'this tree here and now' and then you say 'this house here and now', you use the words 'here' and 'now' to describe to very different objects. Because knowing a particular thing implies the knowledge of the general.
Hegel takes this claim to absolute knowledge and shows that this idea is in itself contradictory. For instance, we could claim that absolute knowledge comes with the knowledge of the particular (sense certainty). I'll take an example, I won't be very faithful to Hegel's vocabulary but it will be easier to understand: In the Phenomenology of spirit, Hegel analyses dialectically the unfolding of certain claims to absolute knowledge. Its starting point is an idea (or a state) which undergoes what Hegel calls 'determinate negation' and then becomes something else.
0 kommentar(er)
