Tell us the story that the inventor of dialectic it was Zeno of Elea, who produced arguments based on the opposition of the theses raised by his opponents with the intention of to refute the notion of movement, thus showing that his master (Parmenides) was right in saying that Being is and non-Being is not é. But we can go back a little further in time, in the time of Heraclitus, father of motoring, in order to understand the origins of dialectics.
According to the way of thinking the world that conceives that everything is changing, language (logos) refers to the phisis, that is, what is said is said of nature. However, thought captures that all objects are in eternal transformation, which prevents a possible conceptual identity from being absolutely known. So, all we have are opinions about the world and, in order not to run the risk of constantly making mistakes, we must to carefully observe this process of becoming or transformation which can be called, at this moment, the dialectic of stuff.
Well, it is precisely here that Zeno's thought comes in, much later, for whom movement is an illusion. He systematizes what we call dialectic precisely to highlight Parmenides' logic, which privileges the uniqueness and univocity of Being. Every kind of judgment other than the tautological one (A is A) introduces movement into thought and, therefore, is wrong.
Some time later, to solve this, Plato promoted a synthesis between the authors of the movement and the immobility, understanding that there are two distinct but complementary realities: the sensible world and the world intelligible. In the sensible, because of its variety and multiplicity, movement is perceived, which in itself would prevent all predication. In the intelligible, there is the problem of communication between ideas, which would allow, as Parmenides understood, that only tautological judgments could be made. So, to safeguard the unity of intelligence in discourses that are sensitive, Plato developed a new form of dialectic, which started from the dialogue between interlocutors who leave the merely sensitive plane in search of ideas. This means that the intelligible world, as an extralinguistic factor, promotes the knowledge of sensitive entities, determining their forms of existence. Pure knowledge is ideal, but even though we cannot reach it absolutely, we must not give up, because it is the ideal that regulates the logos (language).
Aristotle, a disciple of Plato and inventor of what we call logic, understands dialectics as a debate of opinions that are still formally unfounded, but which may or may not result in science. He developed a formal instrument capable of accounting for the mediation relationships between what was said, in order to draw conclusions adequate to the knowledge of objects. This instrument is the syllogism.
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For a long time, dialectics was relegated to the background, being replaced in logic by mathematics. However, in the nineteenth century, a German thinker, Hegel, taking up the thought of Heraclitus and Plato, gave a new understanding of dialectics. According to him, dialectics deals with the synthesis between concrete historical situations that aim at overcoming the oppositions established by each people, in each era. Thus, a political regime, a religion, or any human act (culture in general) is a distancing from nature, but one that seeks to leave itself and return to itself as a spirit. Nature and spirit are the same thing and unfold in what we call the history of reason. There is an interest of reason in developing itself to realize its ideal in the world. The real is rational and the rational is real, Hegel would say, by establishing the notions of thesis, antithesis and synthesis as the very movement of human thought.
However, what was really important was the consequence of this thought for another German philosopher: Karl Marx. According to this author, contradictions in things do not depend on a reason that transcends our reality, but they are the result of the way we organize our production, that is, of our material conditions of existence. It means to say with Marx that we can overcome contradictions by becoming aware of our historical situation, that is, class consciousness. At the apex of its synthesis, the teleological State would not be as Hegel wanted, a State that interests Reason, but a common way of life that would prevent contradictions from arising in order to differentiate people according to economic classes.
Thus, what is common among these authors is that they conceive dialectics as the union between form and content for the understanding of reality, evidencing a logic united to an ontology.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
