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From Hegel’s misunderstood dialectic to the manipulation of the reptilian brain to the North American Union
By Guest Writer Christian deBlanc (bio | articles | forum)
It is a common belief that German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel coined both the term dialectic, as well as a particular form of it: thesis—anti-thesis—synthesis. Moreover, the term Hegelian Dialectic gets thrown around conspiracy theory literature like a football on Thanksgiving. Now, the term dialectic goes back to ancient Athens and it is both synonymous and part and parcel of the Socratic method of using conversation between conflicting, but mutually-agreeable, truth-seeking parties, in order to find the truth of our underlying beliefs about the world. More than that, they constitute the formula through which we can get to the facts of reality. By that I mean they form the basis for logical thought and scientific discourse about the world around us and the life within us all. To be sure, underpinning the notion of the dialectic has always been the idea of a conversation between two people. Or, in the last analysis, just the idea of a back and forth between opposing parties to find truth.
At any rate, for the ancient Greeks, truth may as well have been capitalized and enshrined right next to that sacred abstraction: the Good. Of course, at that time, the Good, the government and the people did not always get along or co-exist and violence ensued. Now, by the time we arrived at the Enlightenment, philosophers like John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rosseau conflated the Good with the natural right of man to seek truth using his own reason without the need to submit oneself necessarily to ecclesiastical or political authority, unless, through a social contract agreed upon, the people or the person willingly consents to be governed by the state and/or by its prevailing beliefs or religion. Indeed, from 1776 onward, letting the will be free has become the ultimate societal Good.
