Someone please explain the Hegelian Dialectic to me

[Rael]

I have been reading about this and I just don't get it. I read something about it that said, "it's not supposed to make sense, if you didn't get it, then you got it." But I don't get that I get it. Get it?

[Brian4Liberty]

Everything I know about Dialectic logic I learned from Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando... :D


YouTube - Apocalypse Now - You can't go out into space... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5JXrP8yv8o)

[Derek Johnson]

I have been reading about this and I just don't get it. I read something about it that said, "it's not supposed to make sense, if you didn't get it, then you got it." But I don't get that I get it. Get it?

Hegel's dialectic is the tool which manipulates us into a frenzied circular pattern of thought and action. Every time we fight for or defend against an ideology we are playing a necessary role in Marx and Engels' grand design to advance humanity into a dictatorship of the proletariat. The synthetic Hegelian solution to all these conflicts can't be introduced unless we all take a side that will advance the agenda. The Marxist's global agenda is moving along at breakneck speed. The only way to completely stop the privacy invasions, expanding domestic police powers, land grabs, insane wars against inanimate objects (and transient verbs), covert actions, and outright assaults on individual liberty, is to step outside the dialectic. This releases us from the limitations of controlled and guided thought.

When we understand what motivated Hegel, we can see his influence on all of our destinies. ... Hegelian conflicts steer every political arena on the planet, from the United Nations to the major American political parties, all the way down to local school boards and community councils. Dialogues and consensus-building are primary tools of the dialectic, and terror and intimidation are also acceptable formats for obtaining the goal. The ultimate Third Way agenda is world government. Once we get what's really going on, we can cut the strings and move our lives in original directions outside the confines of the dialectical madness. Focusing on Hegel's and Engel's ultimate agenda, and avoiding getting caught up in their impenetrable theories of social evolution, gives us the opportunity to think and act our way toward freedom, justice, and genuine liberty for all.

COPY PASTED FROM

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/dialectic.htm

This pretty much sums it up, hope that helps!

[Chieftain1776]

I've had some trouble with this as well. The best I can make of it is that it takes everyone's ideas and says they're all compatible... even if they're contradictory. For example neoconservatives and "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" or "Big Government in support of individual initiative".

It's a way of manipulating language and ideas and lulling the populace into believing all can be achieved. It's not a program but a tactic of allowing elites to obtain power with consensus and then doing whatever they feel is "best".

That's how preemptively invading countries and imposing democracy is now "conservative" when in the case of Kosovo it was reckless foriegn adventurism (the Neocons approved both though). They weave a justification out of thin air (i.e. security through democracy and preemption) and familiar words and ideas gradually lose their original meaning.

That's my stab at it. Here's wikipedia's:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelian_dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic)
Hegelian dialectic, usually presented in a three-fold manner, was stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis.

[donnay]

What is the Hegelian Dialectic?
http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/dialectic.htm

Problem--Reaction---Solution.

The war on drugs is a great example:

[Chieftain1776]

COPY PASTED FROM

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/dialectic.htm

This pretty much sums it up, hope that helps!

That was the best explanation I've ever seen. I'm saving the link.

[SWATH]

"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market" -W

[tonesforjonesbones]

Yes..two words.

circular logic

you go around in circles and get nowhere! tones

[Original_Intent]

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb17/Denryu/Thesis.jpg

IN my example "anti-thesis" is basically where society was headed in the first place, but is not always the case. The Hegelian will therefore "overshoot" what he truly wants to accomplish. A child that asks for a piece of cake in order to actually get a cookie is practicing a rudimentary form of Hegelian dialectic.

[Aratus]

...thesis
anti-thesis
synthesis

[paulitics]

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb17/Denryu/Thesis.jpg

IN my example "anti-thesis" is basically where society was headed in the first place, but is not always the case. The Hegelian will therefore "overshoot" what he truly wants to accomplish. A child that asks for a piece of cake in order to actually get a cookie is practicing a rudimentary form of Hegelian dialectic.

Anyone can see this in action now with the torture debate, and why the (euphamistic) term waterboarding was chosen instead of its old term "water torture.
You have Smerconish and others outrageously saying that blowtorching would be acceptable and that waterboarding is water splashed on the face, and then the left saying waterboarding is torture (which it is undoubtedly). What happens is that people tend to pick the middle, that waterboarding is acceptable to obtain information.

5 years ago, to think 50% of Americans would support torture was inconceivable. The goal was not to sell America on torture, but to condition Americans to accept that someone may have to torture someone to obtain information. This is what happens when you turn a black and white issue to a left vs right.

The next phase is to use this new synthesis and apply it towards making torture an acceptable policy domestically here at home, in addition to the prolonged detainment of Americans without a trial.

After the next terrorist attatck, the government will trial run this new program illegaly (before conditioning the public to accept it) than make it policy.

[ladyjade3]

thesis - antithesis - synthesis
problem - extreme solution with its own new problems - then meet in the middle learning lessons from both extremes.
Like a pendulum continually swinging. Its an easily observable pattern in many areas.

[krazy kaju]

The Hegelian dialectic does not exist. Hegel himself never used it; he maybe referenced something somewhat similar once in the Philosophy of Right, and that's about it. The so-called "Hegelian" dialectic arose when some lecturers misinterpreted Hegel. Marx happened to attend some of the lessons by one such lecturer, which is why the Hegelian dialectic became so famous.