It is important first to remove the most common misconception that considers dialectic a method. Before we examine its precise structure, it is necessary to correct some misunderstandings and to sort through a few controversies. No aspect of Hegel’s philosophy has been more interpreted, more misunderstood, and more controversial. The principle of self-thought of the critical philosophy – a principle that Hegel explicitly rea ffi rmed – demands that we accept only those beliefs that agree with the critical exercise of our own reason. It is for this reason that the method of the Phenomenology would be the self-examination or self-criticism of consciousness. Against Kant, Hegel insisted that the criticism of knowledge must be internal, so that the subject matter is evaluated according to its own inherent standards and goals. All these points came together in Hegel’s complaint that the method of Kantian criticism is external, presupposing the truth of some standard of criticism that does not derive from the concepts themselves. Hegel likened his attempt to know the logic of our concepts before using them to the efforts of the wise Scholasticus to learn to swim before jumping in the water. Third, Kant failed to see that we cannot criticize the forms of thinking without first using them. Second, Kant insisted that we should have a criterion of knowledge before we make claims to knowledge but this demand created an infinite regress, for the criterion of knowledge too amounts to a claim to knowledge, so that we need another higher criterion to test it. Rather, he just classified concepts as either subjective or objective according to his presupposed epistemological principles. First, Kant did not investigate the inherent logic of concepts themselves, determining their precise meaning and powers. In the Encyclopaedia he argued that Kant’s critique of metaphysics had been deficient on several counts. He insisted that Kant had not gone far enough. There were two respects, Hegel further explained, in which the old metaphysics was uncritical: first, it did not examine the meaning of the concepts that it applied to the unconditioned and, second, it did not investigate the limitations of the traditional forms of judgment in knowing the truth. The old metaphysics was naive, because it simply assumed that we could know truth through thinking alone without having first investigated this possibility.
Hence Hegel fully endorsed the demands of Kantian criticism, insisting that ‘any future metaphysics that comes forward as a science alone’ would first have to pass the test of criticism. its failure to investigate the powers and limits of reason.
He agreed entirely with Kant that one of the chief failures of past metaphysics was its dogmatism, i.e. Hegel affirms what Kant denies: that it is possible to have knowledge through pure reason of the absolute or the unconditioned. Hegel had no choice, therefore, but to face the Kantian challenge. It was in just this sense, however, that Kant had attacked the possibility of metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason. Through pure thinking alone Hegel attempts to give us knowledge of reality in itself, the absolute or the universe as a whole. Hegel’s absolute idealism, his organicism, his concept of spirit and notion of God, are metaphysics on the grandest scale.
The category thus reached leads on in a similar way to a third, and the process continues until at last we reach the goal of the dialectic in a category which betrays no instability (McTaggart and McTaggart, 1999) – the ultimate synthesis. He teaches that this connection is of such a kind that any category, if scrutinised with sufficient care and attention, is found to lead on to another, and to involve it, in such a manner that an attempt to use the first of any subject while we refuse to use the second of the same subject results in a contradiction. Hegel’s primary object in his dialectic is to establish the existence of a logical connection between the various categories which are involved in the constitution of experience.
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