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
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc.
Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).
This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
mail at (knight.org/advent). For more information please download
the file cathen.txt/.zip.
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