![]() Here I am riffing off of an example Hegel provides at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit. To begin to address the question, permit me to use a crude and perhaps misleading parable to make a point that I will further specify later. What would it mean for Truth, and Reason’s capacity for grasping it, to be transformable, to undergo change? It is an important question, because as I hope to demonstrate, it is at the heart of why Hegel finds dialectics necessary. The Hegel scholar Robert Pippin defines traditional metaphysics as “a priori knowledge of substance.” Why is substance, or Truth, able to be known a priori? Because neither Truth, nor our ability to know it, transforms in traditional philosophy. I would argue that this is the essential characteristic of traditional, pre-critical philosophy: an assertion of a static, unchanging, eternal Truth. The True is True for Plato precisely because both it and our ability to comprehend it through Reason doesn’t change. Plato grants that the world of the senses is in a state of constant flux, but True reality for Plato lies in the unchanging world of Forms, grasped by unchanging Reason. To paint a very broad picture, if philosophy has always been concerned with grasping the Truth of reality, then prior to Kant and Hegel - but more importantly, prior to the development of modern, bourgeois society - this Truth was understood to be eternal, essentially static and unchanging. The character of this change - how the object is changing - is of deep significance and something I will address later. My central claim is that Hegel finds his dialectics necessary because he is attempting to more adequately comprehend an object in a process of change and transformation. Perhaps a more fruitful but less straightforward way of getting at the matter is by way of a different question: not what, but why dialectics for Hegel? If we can agree that Hegel was doing more than intentionally trying to be edgy or mystifying, we must ask ourselves why Hegel thought dialectics was necessary. ![]() Adorno astutely asserts that dialectics eludes definition by its very nature, that it is better demonstrated than defined. Perhaps the first question that may come to mind for anyone making the daunting attempt to understand Hegel is, what is Hegelian dialectics? I could provide a one-line definition, such as “the interpenetration of opposites,” but such a definition might not elucidate much.
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