The reason this is weird is that Hegel never used that formula to describe his version of dialectics. For Hegel, dialectics was not simply a principle of logic. He used it to understand developments in history, organic growth, and even natural science and physics more generally.
Hegel's brand of dialectics
His use of the concept in organic development is shown by his famous example of a tree growing. Hegel had been very interested in Goethe's studies on plants in Weimar while Hegel was a professor in nearby Weimar, and Goethe's findings were an important influence on the development of Hegel's thought. As Julie Maybee describes it (Hegel’s Dialectics Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 06/3/2016):
... the highest determination of the concept of “tree” will include within its definition the dialectical process of development and change from seed to sapling to tree. As Hegel says, dialectics is “the principle of all natural and spiritual life” ..., or “the moving soul of scientific progression” ... Dialectics is what drives the development of both reason as well as of things in the world.Hegel saw the dialectical movement (in thought and in things) as based on contradictions. Science around 1800 was being transformed by important developments in understanding magnetism, electricity, and chemistry. Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) successfully demonstrated the first battery to store electricity in 1800, for which he was rightly renowned. Recent discoveries in geology and expanded biological investigations had made people aware that the earth and its organic inhabitants had gone through long periods of complex development. Physics was advanced enough that there was discussion of how the universe may be expanding out from a single central point. The nature of light and its relationship to heat was a big focus. Goethe famously criticized Isaac Newton's theory of light heavily; his criticism was basically wrong, but it wasn't as quirky as it has sometimes been portrayed.
Old science can later sound like mystical speculation
It requires some effort today to picture how drastically innovative such things seemed at the time. Science, and philosophy that tries to make theoretical frameworks based on the science of its time, are trying to understand new discoveries in the context of previous knowledge and assumptions and to make new assumptions in the process. In the period around 1800, Charles Darwins's and Alfred Russel Wallace's work that produced the theory of biological evolution by natural selection and Gregor Mendel's gene theory were in the future. So for people of Hegel's time to understand evolution in the way that was possible in 1900 or today. Just as our understandings of gravity, time, and space could only take their current forms after Einstein's theory of relativity and theories of quantum physics based on expanded knowledge of the microscopic world had been developed.
But the cutting-edge discoveries in magnetism, electricity, and chemistry put dualities like attraction and repulsion, combination and separation, positive and negative poles, at the center of understanding the physical world. So while dialectic thought in philosophy had a long history going back to Heracleitus and Socrates, the versions that appear in Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854) were simply relics of ancient philosophy, but philosophical forms newly applied and developed based on contemporary knowledge.
Hegel's understood the growth of a tree in his scheme as a process of contradiction and development. The acorn in the ground grows into a tree. In Hegel's terms, the tree is the negation of the acorn. When it emerges as a tree, it is no longer an acorn. But when the acorn becomes the tree, what is happening is that the possibility contained in the acorn to become a tree is becoming real. In this case, it could be said to be a teleological possibility, because the acorn is organically programmed to become a tree. In Hegelian terms, developing into a tree is a necessity for the acorn. It cannot remain in the form of only an acorn.
In this understanding, the acorn and the tree are contradictions of each other, in the sense that the acorn contains its acorn nature and also the tree is a inherent part of the acorn. It is part of the nature of an acorn that it has an internal drive to become a tree, i.e., not-an-acorn.
But Hegel understands the acorn-to-tree transformation as an Aufheben, which translates into the generally unfamiliar English word ablation. Klaus Wieweg describes the scheme as the "logischen Form der bestimmten Negation - der berühmten Hegelschen Aufhebung als Einheit von Vernichten, Bewahren und Hoherheben."
Hegel's "ablation" (preserving, cancelling, and raising to a higher level) is not that famous triad
The acorn is destroyed or cancelled in the sense of no longer being an acorn. But it is maintained or preserved in the sense that the tree form was already contained in the acorn; it's a transformation of the same organic entity. And it is raised to a higher level in the sense that it has become a bigger and more mature form of itself.
Herbert Marcuse in his book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941/1960) writes:
... Hegel makes the claim that the triad (Triplizität) is the true form of thought. He does not state it as an empty schema of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but as the dynamic unity of opposites. It is the proper form of thought because it is the proper form of a reality in which every being is the synthetic unity of antagonistic conditions. [my emphasis in bold]Walter Kaufmann (Hegel: An Introduction, 1965) describes Hegel's use of Aufheben in his dialectical triad as having the triple meaning of preserving, cancelling, and lifting up to another (implicitly higher) level:
... the characteristic Hegelian term aufheben, rendered "sublimate" throughout this book, is encountered in Schiller. The word, of course, is common and can mean "cancel" - and in Hegel's usage it almost always means at least that - but it can also mean "preserve" and, thirdly, "lift up." Often Hegel uses aufheben to suggest all three meanings at once, as in the example just given. ...The Hegel scholarship is clear on the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad: Hegel didn't use it.
Aufheben (sublimate) means literally "pick up." Like every single one of the other terms explained so far, it is quite common in ordinary speech: it is what you do when something bas fallen to the floor. But this original sensuous meaning has given rise to two derivative meanings which are no less common: "cancel," and "preserve" or "keep." Something may be picked up in order that it will no longer be there; on the other hand, I may also pick it up to keep it. When Hegel uses the term in its double (or triple) meaning - and he expressJy informs us that he does ... - he may be said to visualize how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, of course, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level. [my emphasis in bold]
Kaufmann writes:
In an interesting note in the second edition [of the Critique of Pure Reason], Kant called attention to the fact that his twelve categories of the understanding are arranged in four groups of three, and that the third category in each group is a synthesis of the two preceding it. (He did not use the word "synthesis" at this point...)Gustav Mueller, who Kaufmann cites, wrote in "The Hegel Legend of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" (Journal of the History of Ideas 19:3; June 1958) criticizing the treatment W.T. Stace gave to Hegel's dialectic:
Fichte introduced into German philosophy the three-step of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, using these three terms. Schelling took up this terminology; Hegel did not. He never once used these three terms together to designate three stages in an argument or account in any of his books. And they do not help us understand his Phenomenology, his Logic, or his philosophy of history; they impede any open-minded comprehension of what he does by forcing it into a schema which was available to him and which he deliberately spurned. The mechanical formalism, in particular, with which critics since Kierkegaard have charged him, he derides expressly and at some length in the preface to the Phenomenology. [my emphasis in bold]
This abstract separation of "principles" and " vision" is utterly un-Hegelian. The actual texts of Hegel not only occasionally deviate from "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," [as Stone argued] but show nothing of the sort. "Dialectic" does not for Hegel mean "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Dialectic means that any "ism " - which has a polar opposite, or is a special viewpoint leaving " the rest " to itself - must be criticized by the logic of philosophical thought, whose problem is reality as such, the "World-itself."Mueller could identify only two obvious references in Hegel's works to the "the Fichtean terms 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis'" used together:
In all the twenty volumes of Hegel's "complete works" [as of 1958] he does not use this "triad" once; nor does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth century. He refers to "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" in the Preface of the Phaenomenology of Mind, where he considers the possibility of this "triplicity" as a method or logic of philosophy. According to the Hegel-legend one would expect Hegel to recommend this "triplicity."There Hegel uses the term "triplicity" to refer to philosophical use of the triad without explicitly citing the words "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis".
But, after saying that it was derived from Kant, he calls it a "lifeless schema," "mere shadow" and concludes: "The trick of wisdom of that sort is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice. Its repetition, when once it is familiar, becomes as boring as the repetition of any bit of sleight-of-hand once we see through it. The instrument for producing this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter, on which lie only two colours..." [my emphasis]Where does this misreading of Hegel originate?
So how did the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis become a common way to describe Hegel's dialectic?
Mueller did some scholarly detective work and traced it back to this source:
In the winter of 1835-36, a group of Kantians in Dresden called on Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel, to lecture to them on the new philosophical movement after Kant. They were older, professional men who in their youth had been Kantians, and now wanted an orientation in a development which they distrusted; but they also wanted a confirmation of their own Kantianism. Professor Chalybäus did just those two things. His lectures appeared in 1837 under the title Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel, Zu näherer Verständigung des wissenschaftlichen Publikums mit der neuesten Schule. The book was very popular and appeared in three editions. In my copy of the third edition of 1843, Professor Chalybäus says (p. 354): "This is the first trilogy: the unity of Being, Nothing and Becoming ... we have in this first methodical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis ... an example or schema for all that follows." This was for Chalybäus a brilliant hunch which he had not used previously and did not pursue afterwards in any way at all. [my emphasis in bold]But a young philosophy student named Karl Marx ...
... was at that time a student at the University of Berlin and a member of the Hegel Club where the famous book was discussed. He took the hunch and spread it into a deadly, abstract machinery. Other left-Hegelians, such as Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner use "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" just as little as Hegel.Marx, now the most famous of the Young Hegelians, did run with the triad in describing Hegel, presumably having picked it up directly or indirectly from Chalybäus.
Marx cites the triad in his early work The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865):
If we had M. Proudhon's intrepidity in the matter of Hegelianism we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heels, in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself – position, opposition, composition. Or, to speak Greek – we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. [my emphasis]Not surprisingly for an article appearing in the deep Cold War year of 1958, Mueller makes sure he harshes on Marx and Marxists for spreading this misimpression, e.g., "Brutal simplifications are Marxistic [sic] specialties." But as his article demonstrates, Marx and his intellectual followers may have just plain misunderstood Hegel's dialectic in this particular way. They didn't just pull the formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis out of the air, since both Fichte and Schelling used it, and Hegel in his early career was a close ally and supporter of Schelling and his philosophy.
Peter Benson gives a more generous version (Hegel and the Trinity Philosophy Now 42:2003): "If read carefully, Marx’s account of Hegel’s philosophy is fairly accurate. But his use of the word ‘synthesis’ has subsequently led to grave misunderstandings."
The misreading of Hegel's concept of dialectics was picked up and commonly propagated by Marxists, although there were Marxist readings of Hegel like the one quoted from Herbert Marcuse above that did not.
David Riazanov, founder and director of the USSR's Marx-Engels Institute, wrote in his book Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1927):
In each phenomenon, in each object, there is the clash of two principles, the thesis and the antithesis, the conservative and the destructive. This struggle between the two opposing principles resolves itself into a final harmonious synthesis of the two.But it wasn't.
This is how it was expressed in the Hegelian idiom.
(I did a similar post on the above The thesis-antithesis-synthesis mystery on 01/10/2015.)
The "Hegelsche Prinzip"
It was only this year that I became aware of a weird twist on the Hegel/thesis-anthesis-synthesis story. I've only encountered it in German as "das Hegelsche Prinzip" (Hegel Principle or Hegelian Principle) and haven't come across it in English. It (fortunately) doesn't seem to be very widespread. But we see crackpot notions bubble their way into the mainstream all too often.
One of the few mentions I find online is from a blog that was apparently active for only a few months during 2014, called Gehirnwaschmaschine (Brainwashing Machine) that seems to have been an attempt to illustrate some techniques of information manipulation in the media. It seems to have to struck a fairly neutral tone politically, though the kinds of manipulation it discusses are most often encountered these days on the radical right. The pseudonymous author is Vladderjunker.
In Das Hegelsche Prinzip (Gehirnwaschmaschine Blog 06/10/2014), he assumes that Hegel employed the dialectical triad theseis-anthesis-synthesis, and he tries to apply this (actually non-Hegelian) "Hegel Principle" to political propaganda:
Das Hegel-Prinzip arbeitet mit der Dreiheit [sic] These, Antithese und Synthese. Im Zusammenhang mit der Manipulation der Bevölkerung wird folgender Prozess durchgeführt: Um ein bestimmtes Ziel zu erreichen, schafft man zuerst eine Tatsache bzw. ein Problem (These), erzeugt damit eine Reaktion (Antithese) und bietet dann eine Lösung des Problems an (Synthese).Aside from being a bad description of basic Hegelian thinking, Hegel was not in the habit of giving PR advice on political messaging for demagogic politics. Hopefully, the Hegel-Prinzip notion will stay in the obscurity in which it currently resides.
[The Hegel-Prinzip works with the triad thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In connection with the manipulation of the population, the following process is carried out: In order to achieve a certain goal, one first creates a fact or problem (thesis), thus generates a reaction (antithesis) and then offers a solution to the problem (synthesis ).] (my translation)
Robert Stern podcast
This Philosophy Bites podcast with Robert Stern (Hegel on Dialectic) is an example of how thesis-antithesis-synthesis is hard for people explaining Hegel's concept to avoid. But it's still, well, wrong.
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