Dialectic

[Greek dialektike (techne or methodos), the dialectic art or 
method, from dialegomai I converse, discuss, dispute; as noun also 
dialectics; as adjective, dialectical]. 

(1) In Greek philosophy the word originally signified 
"investigation by dialogue", instruction by question and answer, 
as in the heuristic method of Socrates and the dialogues of Plato. 
The word dialectics still retains this meaning in the theory of 
education. 

(2) But as the process of reasoning is more fundamental than its 
oral expression, the term dialectic came to denote primarily the 
art of inference or argument. In this sense it is synonymous with 
logic. It has always, moreover, connoted special aptitude or 
acuteness in reasoning, "dialectical skill"; and it was because of 
this characteristic of Zeno's polemic against the reality of 
motion or change that this philosopher is said to have been styled 
by Aristotle the master or founder of dialectic. 

(3) Further, the aim of all argumentation being presumably the 
acquisition of truth or knowledge about reality, and the process 
of cognition being inseparably bound up with its content or 
object, i. e. with reality, it was natural that the term dialectic 
should be again extended from function to object, from thought to 
thing; and so, even as early as Plato, it had come to signify the 
whole science of reality, both as to method and as to content, 
thus nearly approaching what has been from a somewhat later period 
universally known as metaphysics. It is, however, not quite 
synonymous with the latter in the objective sense of the science 
of real being, abstracting from the thought processes by which 
this real being is known, but rather in the more subjective sense 
in which it denotes the study of being in connection with the 
mind, the science of knowledge in relation to its object, the 
critical investigation of the origin and validity of knowledge as 
pursued in psychology and epistemology. Thus Kant describes as 
"transcendental dialectic" his criticism of the (to him futile) 
attempts of speculative human reason to attain to a knowledge of 
such ultimate realities as the soul, the universe, and the Deity; 
while the monistic system, in which Hegel identified thought with 
being and logic with metaphysics, is commonly known as the 
"Hegelian dialectic". 

A. THE DIALECTIC METHOD IN THEOLOGY

[For dialectic as equivalent to logic, see art. LOGIC, and cf. (2) 
above. It is in this sense we here speak of dialectic in 
theology.] The traditional logic, or dialectic, of Aristotle's 
"Organon"--the science and art of (mainly deductive) reasoning--
found its proper application in exploring the domain of purely 
natural truth, but in the early Middle Ages it began to be applied 
by some Catholic theologians to the elucidation of the 
supernatural truths of the Christian Revelation. The perennial 
problem of the relation of reason to faith, already ably discussed 
by St. Augustine in the fifth century, was thus raised again by 
St. Anselm in the eleventh. During the intervening and earlier 
centuries, although the writers and Fathers of the Church had 
always recognized the right and duty of natural reason to 
establish those truths preparatory to faith, the existence of God 
and the fact of revelation, those praeambula fidei which form the 
motives of credibility of the Christian religion and so make the 
profession of the Christian Faith a rationabile obsequium, a 
"reasonable service", still their attitude inclined more to the 
Crede ut intelligas (Believe that you may understand) than to the 
Intellige ut credas (understand that you may believe); and their 
theology was a positive exegesis of the contents of Scripture and 
tradition. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, 
rational speculation was applied to theology not merely for the 
purpose of proving the praeambula fidei, but also for the purpose 
of analysing, illustrating and showing forth the beauty and the 
suitability of the mysteries of the Christian Faith. This method 
of applying to the contents of Revelation the logical forms of 
rational discussion was called "the dialectic method of theology". 
Its introduction was opposed more or less vigorously by such 
ascetic and mystic writers as St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, and 
Walter of St. Victor; chiefly, indeed, because of the excess to 
which it was carried by those rationalist and theosophist writers 
who, like Peter Abelard and Raymond Lully, would fain demonstrate 
the Christian mysteries, subordinating faith to private judgment. 
The method was saved from neglect and excess alike by the great 
Scholastics of the thirteenth century, and was used to advantage 
in their theology. After five or six centuries of fruitful 
development, under the influence, mainly, of this deductive 
dialectic, theology has again been drawing, for a century past, 
abundant and powerful aid from a renewed and increased attention 
to the historical and exegetical studies that characterized the 
earlier centuries of Christianity. 

B. DIALECTIC AS FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

[cf. (3) above] 

(1) The Platonic Dialectic 

From the beginnings of Greek philosophy reflection has revealed a 
twofold element in the contents of the knowing human mind: an 
abstract, permanent, immutable element, usually referred to the 
intellect or reason; and a concrete, changeable, ever-shifting 
element, usually referred to the imagination and the external 
senses. Now, can the real world possess such opposite 
characteristics? Or, if not, which set really represents it? For 
Heraclitus and the earlier Ionians, stability is a delusion; all 
reality is change--panta hrei. For Parmenides and the Eleatics, 
change is delusion; reality is one, fixed, and stable. But then, 
whence the delusion, if such there be, in either alternative? Why 
does our knowledge speak with such uncertain voice, or which 
alternative are we to believe? Both, answers Plato, but intellect 
more than sense. What realities, the latter asks, are revealed by 
those abstract, universal notions we possess of being, number, 
cause, goodness, etc., by the necessary, immutable truths we 
apprehend and the comparison of those notions? The dialectic of 
the Platonic "Ideas" is a noble, if unsuccessful, attempt to 
answer this question. These notions and truths, says Plato, have 
for objects ideas which constitute the real world, the mundus 
intelligibilis, of which we have thus a direct and immediate 
intellectual intuition. These beings, which are objects of our 
intellectual knowledge, these ideas, really exist in the manner in 
which they are represented by the intellect, i. e. as necessary, 
universal, immutable, eternal, etc. But where is this mundus 
intelligibilis? It is a world apart (choris), separate from the 
world of fleeting phenomena revealed to the senses. And is this 
latter world, then, real or unreal? It is, says Plato, but a 
shadowy reflex of reality, a dissolving-view of the ideas, about 
which our conscious sense-impressions can give us mere opinion 
(doxa), but not that reliable, proper knowledge (episteme) which 
we have of the ideas. This is unsatisfactory. It is an attempt to 
explain an admitted connection between the noumenal and the 
phenomenal elements in knowledge by suppressing the reality of the 
latter altogether. Nor is Plato any more successful in his 
endeavour to show how the idea, which for him is a really existing 
being, can be at the same time one and manifold, or, in other 
words, how it can be universal, like the mental notion that 
represents it. 

(2) Aristotelean and Scholastic Dialectic 

Aristotle taught, in opposition to his master Plato, that these 
"ideas" or objects of our intellectual notions do not exist apart 
from, but are embodied in, the concrete, individual data of sense. 
It is one and the same reality that reveals itself under an 
abstract, universal, static aspect to the intellect, and under a 
concrete, manifold, dynamic aspect to the senses. The Christian 
philosophers of the Middle Ages took up and developed this 
Aristotelean conception, making it one of the cardinal doctrines 
of Scholastic philosophy, the doctrine of modern Realism. The 
object of the abstract, universal notion, they taught, is real 
being; it constitutes and is identical with the individual data of 
sense-knowledge; it is numerically multiplied and individualized 
in them, while it is unified as a class-concept or universal 
notion (unum commune pluribus) by the abstractive power of the 
intellect which apprehends the element common to the individuals 
of a class without their differentiating characteristics. The 
universal notion thus exists as universal only in the intellect, 
but it has a foundation in the individual data of sense, inasmuch 
as the content of the notion really exists in these sense-data, 
though the mode of its existence there is other than the mode in 
which the notion exists in the intellect: universale est 
formaliter in mente, fundamentaliter in re. Nor does the 
intellect, in thus representing individual phenomena by universal 
notions, falsify its object or render intellectual knowledge 
unreliable; it represents the Real inadequately, no doubt, not 
exhaustively or comprehensively, yet faithfully so far as it goes; 
it does not misrepresent reality, for it merely asserts of the 
latter the content of its universal notion, not the mode (or 
universality) of the latter, as Plato did. 

But if we get all our universal notions, necessary judgments, and 
intuitions of immutable truth through the ever-changing, 
individual data of sense, how are we to account for the timeless, 
spaceless, changeless, necessary character of the relations we 
establish between these objects of abstract, intellectual thought: 
relations such as "Two and two are four", "Whatever happens has a 
cause", "Vice is blameworthy"? Not because our own or our 
ancestors' perceptive faculties have been so accustomed to 
associate certain elements of consciousness that we are unable to 
dissociate them (as materialist and evolutionist philosophers 
would say); nor yet, on the other hand, because in apprehending 
these necessary relations we have a direct and immediate intuition 
of the necessary, self-existent, Divine Being (as the Ontologists 
have said, and as some interpret Plato to have meant); but simply 
because we are endowed with an intellectual faculty which can 
apprehend the data of sense in a static condition and establish 
relations between them abstracting from all change. 

By means of such necessary, self-evident truths, applied to the 
data of sense-knowledge, we can infer that our own minds are 
beings of a higher (spiritual) order than material things and that 
the beings of the whole visible universe--ourselves included--are 
contingent, i. e. essentially and entirely dependent on a 
necessary, all-perfect Being, who created and conserves them in 
existence. In opposition to this creationist philosophy of Theism, 
which arrives at an ultimate plurality of being, may be set down 
all forms of Monism or Pantheism, the philosophy which terminates 
in the denial of any real distinction between mind and matter, 
thought and thing, subject and object of knowledge, and the 
assertion of the ultimate unity of being. 

(3) The Kantian Dialectic 

While Scholastic philosophers understand by reality that which is 
the object directly revealed to, and apprehended by, the knowing 
mind through certain modifications wrought by the reality in the 
sensory and intellectual faculties, idealist or phenomenalist 
philosophers assume that the direct object of our knowledge is the 
mental state or modification itself, the mental appearance, or 
phenomenon, as they call it; and because we cannot clearly 
understand how the knowing mind can transcend its own revealed, or 
phenomenal, self or states in the act of cognition, so as to 
apprehend something other than the immediate, empirical, 
subjective content of that act, these philosophers are inclined to 
doubt the validity of the "inferential leap" to reality, and 
consequently to maintain that the speculative reason is unable to 
reach beyond subjective, mental appearances to a knowledge of 
things-in-themselves. Thus, according to Kant, our necessary and 
universal judgments about sense-data derive their necessity and 
universality from certain innate, subjective equipments of the 
mind called categories, or forms of thought, and are therefore 
validly applicable only to the phenomena or states of sense-
consciousness. We are, no doubt, compelled to think of an 
unperceived real world, underlying the phenomena of external 
sensation, of an unperceived real ego, or mind, or soul, 
underlying the conscious flow of phenomena which constitute the 
empirical or phenomenal ego, and of an absolute and ultimate 
underlying, unconditioned Cause of the ego and the world alike; 
but these three ideas of the reason--the soul, the world, and God-
-are mere natural, necessary products of the mental process of 
thinking, mere regulative principles of thought, devoid of all 
real content, and therefore incapable of revealing reality to the 
speculative reason of man. Kant, nevertheless, believed in these 
realities, deriving a subjective certitude about them from the 
exigencies of the practical reason, where he considered the 
speculative reason to have failed. 

(4) The Hegelian Dialectic. 

Post-Kantian philosophers disagreed in interpreting Kant. Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel developed some phases of his teaching in a 
purely monistic sense. If what Kant called the formal element in 
knowledge--i. e. the necessary, universal, immutable element--
comes exclusively from within the mind, and if, moreover, mind can 
know only itself, what right have we to assume that there is a 
material element independent of, and distinct from, mind? Is not 
the content of knowledge, or in other words the whole sphere of 
the knowable, a product of the mind or ego itself? Or are not 
individual human minds mere self-conscious phases in the evolution 
of the one ultimate, absolute Being? Here we have the idealistic 
monism or pantheism of Fichte and Schelling. Hegel's dialectic is 
characterized especially by its thoroughgoing identification of 
the speculative thought process with the process of Being. His 
logic is what is usually known as metaphysics: a philosophy of 
Being as revealed through abstract thought. His starting-point is 
the concept of pure, absolute, indeterminate being; this he 
conceives as a process, as dynamic. His method is to trace the 
evolution of this dynamic principle through three stages: 

1.the stage in which it affirms, or posits, itself as thesis; 

2.the stage of negation, limitation, antithesis, which is a 
necessary corollary of the previous stage; 

3.the stage of synthesis, return to itself, union of opposites, 
which follows necessarily on (l) and (2). 

Absolute being in the first stage is the idea simply (the subject-
matter of logic); in the second stage (of otherness) it becomes 
nature (philosophy of nature); in the third stage (of return or 
synthesis) it is spirit (philosophy of spirit--ethics, politics, 
art, religion, etc.). 

Applied to the initial idea of absolute Being, the process works 
out somewhat like this: All conception involves limitation, and 
limitation is negation; positing or affirming the notion of Being 
involves its differentiation from non-being and thus implies the 
negation of being. This negation, however, does not terminate in 
mere nothingness; it implies a relation of affirmation which leads 
by synthesis to a richer positive concept than the original one. 
Thus: absolutely indeterminate being is no less opposed to, than 
it is identical with, absolutely indeterminate nothing: or BEING-
NOTHING; but in the oscillation from the one notion to the other 
both are merged in the richer synthetic notion, of BECOMING. 

This is merely an illustration of the a priori dialectic process 
by which Hegel seeks to show how all the categories of thought and 
reality (which he identifies) are evolved from pure, 
indeterminate, absolute, abstractly-conceived Being. It is not an 
attempt at making his system intelligible. To do so in a few 
sentences would be impossible, if only for the reason, that Hegel 
has read into ordinary philosophical terms meanings that are quite 
new and often sufficiently remote from the currently accepted 
ones. To this fact especially is due the difficulty experienced by 
Catholics in deciding with any degree of certitude whether, or how 
far, the Hegelian Dialectic--and the same in its measure is true 
of Kant's critical philosophy also--may be compatible with the 
profession of the Catholic Faith. That these philosophies have 
proved dangerous, and have troubled the minds of many, was only to 
be expected from the novelty of their view-points and the 
strangeness of their methods of exposition. Whether, in the minds 
of their leading exponents, they contained much, or little, or 
anything incompatible with Theism and Christianity, it would be as 
difficult as it would be perhaps idle to attempt to decide. Be 
that as it may, the attitude of the Catholic Church towards 
philosophies that are new and strange in their methods and 
terminology must needs be an attitude of alertness and vigilance. 
Conscious of the meaning traditionally attached by her children to 
the terms in which she has always expounded those ultimate 
philosophico-religious truths that lie partly along and partly 
beyond the confines of natural human knowledge, and realizing the 
danger of their being led astray by novel systems of thought 
expressed in ambiguous language, she has ever wisely warned them 
to "beware lest any man cheat [them] by philosophy, and vain 
deceit" (Coloss., ii, 8). 

For the use of dialectic in the early Christian and medieval 
schools, see ARTS, THE SEVEN LIBERAL. 

P. COFFEY 
Transcribed by Rick McCarty