Hegel Dialectics Explained in 3 minutes

[thaoneasianguy]

I see this is where "ermmmm actually 🤓" came from

[limlimewastaken]

Its not personal animosity, just Hegelian dialectics.

[ComradeZBunch]

Wasn't "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" first used by Fichte?

[MGHOoL]

Although touches on the surface of how meaning grows out of negation, this isn't exactly Hegel. To Hegel, it is the thing in itself (positive, internal, inward, intrinsic) facing its own negation (a thing for itself; negative, external, outward, extrinsic). The positive is like a hidden, withdrawn, potential being that is nothing real yet. As such, you get the first dialectic: being and nothingness. Only when you lose yourself to nothingness will you return to yourself real (like one explains: 'what is lost was never possessed'; it is like how you miss your childhood, but only so through your adult consciousness i.e. childhood's value only comes after it is lost).

So, a Hegelian example would be recognition theory (the master-slave dialectic) which is: you first live subjectively, looking at the world as a whole as a matter under your will as a subject, all is realized through your mind. This is like a child who still doesn't recognize object permanence, that believes if they scream the world would collapse and people would rush to help them, that when told to show their parent a drawing they would look at it instead believing everyone sees what they see, that when they go to hiding they just close their eyes, etc. After which, you are confronted by your negation: another person. This person to you cannot be a simple object, because they seem to possess an uncontrollable mystery, a will, a complexity, etc. in addition to whatever evolutionarily incentives and empathies that lead you to, overall, see them, too, as a subject of sort similar you. This, however, brings the implication of you, alternatively, becoming an object in their eyes, becoming 'someone else'. As such, you start to recognize yourself (through the other) as an object (say, of thought, to relate to), which in turn gives you self-consciousness. It is like the Sartre's other in which their gaze makes you ashamed of your snooping for example (because you became self-conscious of how you are not following your standard of goodness). However, you don't want something to antithesize your subjectivity, so you try to kill them (to end the negation and return to your positivity). But, in doing so, you will lose your consciousness (which gives you great freedom and meaning). So, you just end up enslaving them (believing your subjectivity is superior and foremost). This again is problematic, for that your objectivity is now diminished (i.e. you are a human only in the eyes of a slave). So, your final situation is to equalize yourself with them and grow together (or in the Kierkegaardian sense, you want to elevate the other to their highest, and that is God, and you through them is Jesus).

This is similar to adolescence and in which you start to formulate an identity-narrative (a story of you from the past to the future that gives you an abstract and internalized formulation of yourself to conceptually manipulate and social articulate to know your place in the world) and gain a form of self-consciousness as you individuate from your parents and identify with your peers (hence creating a greater dialectic). It is also the same when we symbolically articulate our life (say, the development in language), and overall culture that gives you symbols (religion, politics, values, roles, clothes, music, etc.) to see yourself through. Lacan deems those symbolism as the network in which you 'mirror' yourself through them (and Capitalism constantly manipulates it, and hence what you identify with, to push you to consume more. This is what's called Age of Schizophrenic). In Hegel's logic, this can be all formulated as the matter of 'Time', where Time is the synthesizer between your withdrawn/positive/potential being and your nothingness to yourself. Time, for example, is like memory, it is like when you start to abstract the ball from the background and realize that it is a separate object from the rest of the field due to temporal changes. To yourself, you are now more than the moment, a persistent thing. This, in turn, makes you not a 'being', but a 'becoming', a 'coming to be' antithesized by 'ceasing to be' or what we might say: conscious beings are beings conscious of their demise; one gains self-consciousness and by which become conscious of their mortality. The evolutionary and developmental continuation from here is towards greater being, greater consciousness, greater dialectic between individuation and love. This historical story of social recognition, symbolic representation, personal identification, and confronting death is the story of consciousness, and it is found in the development of philosophy, religion, and art. This is Hegel's philosophy which later Marx tried to materialize (create a normative philosophy of freedom and consciousness as the synthesis between proletariat vs. bourgeoise dialectic; remove the alienation of religions for a social, humanistic recognition; use the arts to protest the condition of the proletariat).

[mojewjewjew]

I was expecting more fallout related comments but anyway.

"Its not personal animosity, just hegelian dialectics"
"We have cities of our own, but nothing compared to Vegas. Finally, my Legion will have its Rome"

[MarcosVinicius-efxc]

Using water's physical state as an example was precise. Very nice and thanks for it, it helped me a lot ☺️

[thedukeofdukers]

ummm Actually :^P this is more Fichte than Hegel, as Hegel never used language like thesis, antithesis, or synthesis. Hegelian dialectics involves the historical development of consciousness through Reason, an important concept in his philosophy which you never mentioned once in the video. You present the dialectic as having 3 parts to the logic, but Hegel describes 3 moments in the life of a concept, a subtle, but important distinction as you present contradictions as popping up from outside the thesis, whereas Hegel rejected this and argued that contradictions were contained within the thesis the whole time.

The first moment is that of "fixity" where the logic seems stable.

Then there's the moment of the dialectical or the "negatively rational" causing instability in the concept and leading to "subflation, " which has a double meaning of negation and preservation. The dialectical moment thus involves a process of sublation, or a process in which the determination from the moment of understanding both cancels and preserves itself as it passes into its opposite.

Then there is the moment of the speculative or the "positively rational" which seeks to bring the first two moments into a unity. This unity is a "nothingness" as it is the result of a process rather than an identifiable thing in the world. It is not a pure nothing however, because it is a "determinate negation" and so has a content.

Omissions like this make it impossible to understand what Hegel was getting at and attributing words he never used to him don't help to explain him either. Also, Hegel rhymes with bagel, not seagal.

[spkekillr]

It's amazing how many tell you they're explaining Hegel and trot out thesis antithesis synthesis. Do any of these ppl bother reading Hegel or just look at some kind of Cliffs notes. Why is it Hegel never uses these terms if they're part of his method?

[duybum]

Can't this Hegel dude just make sense?

[richardcarr]

Thank you! This is about the level of detail that I needed.

[pvtests]

you're my new favorite youtuber, i enjoyed this so much!

[starmazaheri]

Loved every second of this informative and easy to understand, on point, video and to top it all, the end summary was just Super. Thank you so very much.

[ileilanambingaamtheleader]

Antithesis is Silent Treatment.
Thesis is Loud Mistreatment.
Synthesis is Loud Treatment.

[harmonyvix]

"like all good divorces, it begins with an argument" 😂 bro making me laugh a night before my exam

[ignozaingraju]

Simple and made easy to understand, thanks

[conforzo]

As others have said. Dialectical arguments have been made since the Greeks. What you described here is actually the Socratic method of argumentation. Suggest watching Cadell Lasts 3 part serie on Dialectical Thinking

[aneesahmed]

Simple af . Understood everything which I thought was hard to understand . Thanks brother 💯

[ahonaroychowdhury]

this video was so fun to watch! thanks man

[ileilanambingaamtheleader]

Eye Of Providence is Antithesis.
Ignore Of Improvidence is Thesis.
Ignore Of Providence is Synthesis.
Eye Of Improvidence is Synthesis.

[felixbergman-composer]

From Ethan:

"As someone who is also just starting to grapple with Hegel's system, I will try to explain it as best I can.

Hegel--as the above commenter mentioned--did not use the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad to describe his dialectical/speculative method. It can be understood as having three movements; that of the abstract (understanding), dialectic (negative reason), and speculative (positive reason). Now, although this is more accurate to what Hegel is getting at, you can still encounter the same issues with as you do with thesis-antithesis-synthesis if you don't see it in action.

In the beginning of Hegel's Science of Logic, he starts with the concept of pure, indeterminate being. If we analyze pure being, we realize that it has no content, no determinations, so what we are left with is really nothing . Now, the concept of nothing can be understood as the lack of determination, and is thus the same as pure being . We also treat nothing as something which exists when we say "there is nothing." We have now ended up where we started--with pure being. If we continue doing this, being and nothing will just keep vanishing into each other ad infinitum. As Hegel puts it: "they are not the same, [...] they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable, [...] each immediately vanishes in its opposite" (p.60). This movement of immediate vanishing is becoming .

So we went from being, to nothing, and finally becoming. You can picture it as being and nothing as being two sides of the same coin which is becoming. So now, you can probably see how thesis-antithesis-synthesis is misleading. Hegel's dialectical/speculative method is not about making a compromise between two propositions external to each other, but rather the self-movement of concepts through the power of its negative component which leads to the overcoming of its one-sidedness."