By Jacob Ritz
The influence of the dialectic remains ubiquitous in modern thought. This is partially due to the far-reaching impact of G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy and the political ideas of his foremost successor Karl Marx. Yet today dialectics is widely associated with the sophistry of abstract ideas or mysterious formulas (for example, thesis-antithesis-synthesis). It is thus unsurprising that these esoteric and arbitrary presentations lead many to associate dialectics with mysticism rather than rigorous philosophical investigation. To dispel such misconceptions, in this essay I will elucidate the origin of modern dialectics as found in the work of Immanuel Kant. Using this exposition, I will explain common misunderstandings of the dialectic and provide examples of its contemporary relevance.
In § 1 I will explicate Kant’s critical view of cognition that is limited to experience, as outlined in the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic.[i] This positive account of cognition will motivate his later argument in the transcendental dialectic. In this section, I will identify a tension within his view of the limits of reason, which will lead us to the notion of dialectical contradiction and thereby highlight the original impetus for the dialectic. Although my discussion of Kant occupies the greater part of this essay, I hope such a detailed elaboration demonstrates that his theory of knowledge is crucial for appreciating the rational core of the dialectic. A consequent disadvantage of this style of presentation is that I will not have adequate space to analyse the original texts where Hegel develops the dialectic from Kant. To resolve this issue, I principally draw on T. W. Adorno’s account of Hegel’s reception of Kant’s work in An Introduction to Dialectics (1958). I do hope, however, that those interested will have the resources to approach Hegel’s forbidding work after having read this essay.
In § 2, I will discuss some common misconceptions and contemporary examples of the dialectic to illustrate its enduring significance to modern thinking. Naturally, one will doubt the relevance of such an arcane concept to our everyday lives. Outside of academic circles, is the dialectic a valuable or even useful notion today? By answering important questions such as these, it is my hope that this presentation will demystify modern dialectical thought by demonstrating that it is not equivalent to rigid formulas nor some aristocratic mode of thinking; rather, dialectics is a critical form of thinking that bears importance to any contemporary philosophy worthy of the name. Not only is dialectics an indispensable tool for dismantling prevailing dogmas and animating new forms of self-reflection, but it also indicates a pathway towards breaking with identity-based thinking.
§ 1: The Origin of the Dialectic
Dialectics historically began in Ancient Greece with the Socratic method that is presented in Plato’s dialogues.[ii] But the classical notion of the dialectic is not the subject of this essay, for we are interested in its modern conception. And although this notion is most often associated with Hegel, it is in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) of his predecessor, Kant, that we find the true source of this notion.
In the Critique, Kant responds to David Hume’s problematisation of the use of inductive reasoning in natural science; put simply, Hume argues that the observation of particular instances does not allow one to deduce necessary universality from those cases. For example, I reason that since every bird that I have seen is black, every bird that I shall see will also be black. Prima facie,there is a clear flaw in this reasoning. No particular observation, however regular, permits me to deduce the existence of a necessary relation.[iii] Yet the inductive reasoning that underpins such a rationale is precisely what the natural sciences rely upon to generalise from merely empirical observations. Hume’s argument thus undermined the categories of classical metaphysics (namely, causality), since now no one could claim to reasonably deduce necessary relations from the empirical world.
And so, to counter this sceptical view, Kant aimed to answer the question: “How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?”[iv] In other words, how are indubitable and non-trivial propositions possible, particularly those of metaphysics and mathematics? While Hume clearly demonstrated that we can only make associations in the empirical world, Kant insists that our knowledge of mathematics counters such a purely relativistic worldview. He needed, however, to guarantee that our knowledge of its propositions was valid. Adorno clarifies this central aim of the Critique in writing that Kant “attempts to show the possibility of universally valid and necessary knowledge … by analysing consciousness and demonstrating that such universally valid and necessary knowledge is made possible only by the constitutive forms of our consciousness itself.”[v] The point of departure of Kant’s Critique is, therefore, to assume the admittedly debatable proposition that mathematical knowledge is certain.[vi] From this assumption, he wishes to justify the valid application of this knowledge to our experience and hence argue that our judgements about the natural world are not mere associations but possess generalisable validity.[vii]
But before we embark on Kant’s argument, I will briefly explain some basic, though widely misunderstood, terminology. First, Kant defines intuitions [Anschauungen] as presentations [Vorstellungen]of objects to our mind. Sensations [Empfindungen], which are how things affect me, supply me with intuitions. My ability to be affected by things is called my faculty of sensibility [Sinnlichkeit].[viii] Thus, while intuitions are presentations, sensations are the result of our embodied interaction with things. Sensibility is, however, only one half of the puzzle of cognition. For if I were to only passively receive sensations, I would merely experience an unordered multiplicity of presentations. Kant holds that I additionally need concepts [Begriffe] to think together different intuitions so that I may generalise their characteristics; for instance, I have a presentation of a wooden chair in front of me and another presentation of a leather couch. The concept of “seat” allows me to think of these two particulars as part of a broader concept. Through the combination of concepts and intuitions, Kant holds that we may gain cognitive knowledge [Erkenntnis]. Much has been written about whether this conception of our cognitive capacities is coherent. But this need not concern us here; instead, we should note that, for Kant, sensibility is the only way in which we can be supplied with intuitions, since human beings are finite (that is, embodied and relational) beings. An important consequence of this assumption is that he denies that humans have intellectual intuition. That is, he denies that we possess the ability to perceive things that exist independently of experience because there is no way in which we can be supplied with objects except through our embodied activity in the empirical world (that is, our sensible intuition).
The thing-in-itself [Ding an sich] is the name that Kant gives to what is beyond any possible sensible intuition. Its key feature is that it is not cognisable. To cognise something, I need to unite a sensible intuition with a concept. Yet, by definition, the thing-in-itself cannot be supplied in intuition, because it is not an object of experience. I raise this notion of the thing-in-itself to counter a common misinterpretation that is relevant to our understanding of the dialectic. It is often said that the thing-in-itself is incoherent by Kant’s own philosophical standards. On the one hand, he limits knowledge claims to the bounds of possible experience; on the other hand, he posits something that transcends these bounds. Prima facie, we have a simple inconsistency. This objection ignores, however, Kant’s distinction between knowing and thinking. While I can know an empirical object, I can only think of the thing-in-itself.[ix] And so, while Kant denies knowledge of purely formal notions such as the thing-in-itself, this does not mean we cannot say anything about it; rather, claims about a notion of this sort simply do not constitute cognitive knowledge [Erkenntnis] in the sense Kant intends.[x] The type of contradiction that we find in dialectical reasoning thus does not originate from the distinction between objects of experience and the thing-in-itself. But this need not detain us here, for we shall now turn to the transcendental analytic.
In essence, in the transcendental analytic, Kant proposes that if a single consciousness is to have a series of distinct empirical observations, then they are necessarily connected by a temporal experience of a unified objective world.[xi] We can see this argument when he writes that “[all] my representations … must be subject to that condition under which alone I can ascribe them to the identical self as my representations”;[xii] in other words, the unity of my consciousness of a series of sensible intuitions implies my ability to ascribe those experiences to myself. Peter Strawson clarifies this in writing that “[what] is necessary is that there be a distinction … implicit in the concepts employed in experience, between how things are in the world which experience is of and how they are experienced as being, between the order of the world and the order of experience.”[xiii] Another way Strawson expresses this distinction is in the difference between “This is how things are experienced as being” and “Thus and so is how things are.”[xiv] In Kant’s terminology, “This is how things are experienced as being” is called transcendental self-consciousness—that is, the unified self that we presuppose in order to make our everyday experiences coherent. For instance, I see a tree through the window, a pile of books on my desk, and my fan circulate air on a humid summer day. All these empirical objects are subject to the material forces of nature and so are transient. The structure of my experience therefore requires some fixed point to anchor the continuous succession of my observations. If there were no fixed point to my experience, then I would not even be able to apprehend empirical changes, since something changes only relative to another thing that does not change. For Kant, the “I” is the anchoring point in all of these empirical statements. Seen in this light, I am only able to ascribe a unity to these observations insofar as they are linked to some “I” who unites them into a continuous, ordered experience. The “I” is not an object in the world but rather a purely formal unity without content. This is transcendental self-consciousness. Furthermore, because I can also see me (that is, the “I” as object) when I look in the mirror, I cannot ascribe the unity of my experience to the integrity of my body, since it is as transient as any other empirical object. As a result of this argument, Kant posits that when I observe empirical objects and say: “Thus and so is how things are,” I must presuppose the transcendental unity of self-consciousness. In short, transcendental self-consciousness is the condition of possibility for the unity of our lived experience. Kant thereby holds that the formal unity of the self is a necessary assumption if we are to hold that our empirical observations are objective. The status of necessary knowledge (synthetic a priori knowledge) is thus intimately bound together with the empirical world (sensible intuitions).
Moreover, we can now appreciate Kant’s resolution to Hume’s critique of inductive reasoning. Kant concedes that I certainly cannot claim to have found a necessary relation (for example, A caused B) in my observation of the succession of two things (for example, A then B). For I do not observe necessary relations between things-in-themselves but only sensible intuitions that are contingent. Since, however, I require pure concepts (for example, causality) to think together such instances in a coherent way, I may ascribe the origin of a priori concepts to the necessary structure of my mind;[xv] in other words, while there is an aspect of things that is separate from my cognition, what I do cognise remains governed by that cognitive structure. On this account, Kant avoids the fatal error of classical metaphysics that tries to deduce necessary relations from contingent events because he has restricted our knowledge claims to the limits of what is able to be given in experience. Hence, instead of claiming that necessity derives from inherent relations of things-in-themselves, Kant merely states that the causal structure exhibited by natural objects expresses a necessary feature of our minds. If I unite a sensible intuition with the conceptual structure of cognition, then I can derive verifiable knowledge of the world. The consequent adjunct to this conclusion is that the transcendent notions of classical metaphysics (that is, concepts such as God that are beyond my possible experience and thus sensible intuition) are unable to yield knowledge in this strict sense.
Accordingly, in light of the limits to knowledge that Kant established in the transcendental analytic, he now aims to critically interrogate traditional metaphysical notions in the transcendental dialectic. As Strawson writes: “[after] construction, demolition; after the Transcendental Analytic, the Transcendental Dialectic.”[xvi] Adorno describes this negative moment in stating that “on the one hand, it wishes to exhibit the domain within which we are capable of such knowledge, while on the other hand it wishes to show where we are no longer capable of such valid and binding knowledge”; put differently, Kant wishes to exact a critique upon knowledge by means of knowledge itself “to prevent [reason] from running riot, turning wild as it were, and presenting propositions as absolute, necessary, and universal when in reality they are mere fabrications of the human mind.”[xvii] It is from this perspective in the transcendental dialectic that Kant demonstrates the paradoxes to which human reason is led when it attempts to go beyond the limits of possible experience.
It remains unclear, however, what exactly we mean by reason. Put simply, Kant distinguishes between our understanding [Verstand], which supplies us with concepts that impose rule-governed unity onto our representations, and our reason [Vernunft], which generates ideas that regulate the conduct of our understanding. Importantly, because the understanding is governed by the basic rules of formal logic, its propositions are limited by the law of non-contradiction (that is, the rule of classical formal logic that propositions “p is the case” and “p is not the case” cannot both be true). This law will become relevant shortly. But for now, we only need to recognise that, despite the clear and self-evident rules that govern the understanding, reason is clearly the higher faculty for Kant. While the understanding is limited to rigid formal systems that synthesise and order what is given in intuition, reason possesses an uncanny ability to extrapolate from this mere ordering activity. Yet, as we shall see, with such expansive powers come considerable dangers.
For example, in the transcendental dialectic, Kant discusses the notion of the totality of appearances. According to Kant, if I try to reason about such an absolute notion, which can never be supplied by my intuition since it would then be a part of experience and not the whole, then I will inevitably fall into “transcendental illusion.”[xviii] By transcendental illusion, Kant means that I use an idea in a constitutive rather than regulative capacity—that is, I use an idea to claim knowledge of the actual world rather than treat it as a maxim to guide my investigations. For instance, the idea of the totality of appearances can guide a natural scientist who seeks to discover the laws that govern nature. This drive for increasingly complex and unified systems of knowledge inspires the natural scientist to experiment and hence elucidate what is poorly understood; it regulates their practical activity. On the other hand, if one were to take the totality of appearances as a given, that is, to claim knowledge of such a totality, then I have made a methodological error, for I have transposed a purely theoretical entity onto actual experience. For Kant, such an excessive use of reason can only lead to faulty answers and unsatisfying justifications. In the transcendental dialectic, Kant analogously criticises the application of other transcendent ideas, such as the soul and God, to experience. From such a vantage point, Kant’s system seems to cleanly separate the sensible from the intelligible; reasonable claims and doubtful claims; pure thinking and contingent observation. If we were to end there, we would simply have a methodology for scientific investigation that preserves a regulative function for traditional ideas such as God, totality, and the soul. No space is afforded to contradiction such that it can play a productive or positive role in knowledge.
There is nonetheless an outstanding tension implicit within Kant’s concept of the limits to knowledge. If knowledge is so limited, how am I permitted to establish my own limits? In other words, if what I know is limited to experience, then how can I posit a limit between what I know in experience and what I do not know when this limit is irreducible to experience? Am I not claiming some knowledge that cannot itself be derived from experience? Has thought not then, in some sense, already overstepped its own bounds by making such a claim? This is precisely the tension that Hegel identifies in Kant’s work. However, in contrast to Kant, who seeks to externalise such paradoxes and reconfigure them as transcendent ideas, Hegel views them as “an endogenous principle of reason itself.”[xix] Indeed, Adorno writes:
If I failed to step beyond this limit—that is, if I did not myself already possess some absolute cognition as one who expressly reflects upon reason itself—then I could never speak of this limit at all. The limit must be at once posited and transcended. And in this moment—that the limit is acknowledged in all seriousness as unavoidably posited but as one that must nonetheless be transcended—you have the simple form of logical contradiction which this thinking encounters once it no longer moves naively within the realm of either formal-logical or merely empirical knowledge … in other words, once it moves in a realm where the empirical moment and the formal moment can be recognized as mediated with one another.[xx]
It is, therefore, once we leave the realm of the understanding, that is, the realm of formal logic, and enter reason, or reflective thought, that we can see that contradiction is the driving force behind the movement of our knowledge. On the other hand, Kant merely asserts that when we bound reason to experience, we will avoid making empirically unverifiable claims and thus ensure their validity. Our knowledge retains its universality and contradictory-free status only insofar as we are careful not to transcend the limits to experience. But by what standard can we even justify the positing of this boundary? Does the positing of such a limit not demand a more universal standard of knowledge than one limited to experience? Ultimately, Kant fails to address this tension between his self-imposed bounds of reason and his universal standards of knowledge.[xxi]
In consideration of the above argument, we can now see the basic contrast between a Kantian and a dialectical view of knowledge. On the one hand, Kant held that we fall into transcendental illusion that leads to contradictions when we make existential claims that transgress the bounds of possible experience; on the other hand, according to a dialectical perspective, contradiction is an immanent feature of reasoning. Adorno clarifies this by stating that
What is denied … is not the contradiction of form and content or any contradiction of this kind, for such contradiction remains in force as far as our finite and limited knowledge is concerned. But precisely insofar as this knowledge attains self-consciousness, or expressly reflects back upon itself, it comes to realize that contradiction, which it must deploy as a criterion of correctness, is at the same time the organon of truth—that is, it comes to realize that every particular instance of knowledge becomes knowledge only through and by means of contradiction. And this is the way in which this negative principle, this principle of contradiction, is actually derived from the Kantian doctrine of antinomies, as Hegel presents it.[xxii]
It is here that we see how dialectics retains the critical dimension of Kant’s transcendental idealism—that is, a dialectical view reflects on the assumptions implicit in our experience and knowledge. But in contrast to Kant, dialectical philosophy does not assume a specific structure of knowledge that cannot be changed by our experiences. While Kant holds that contradiction only arises when we try to claim knowledge of things beyond our experience, dialectical philosophy recognises that contradictions constantly emerge in our experience of the world. Indeed, we have preconceived ideas of the nature of reality, and when we experience something that conflicts with those assumptions, we must either ignore it or seriously reevaluate our previous understanding. Though the latter process is difficult and often painful, it enables us to derive a new and perhaps broader view of the world. From such a perspective, dialectical contradiction, or the tension between the formal structure of our knowledge and the empirical content that we experience, constitutes the motor for the acquisition of knowledge as such—that is, an organon of truth.
From this contrast, we can see that the dialectical notion of contradiction expresses a dynamic conception of knowledge acquisition. According to Kant’s view, the cognitive structure of our conscious experience is fixed and eternal. His system already presents the essential aspects of how we can acquire knowledge. For Kant, Isaac Newton’s theory of physics is the archetype for such a self-sufficient system of investigation. Newton’s theory postulates some basic laws—for example, space is the same everywhere and is an “empty container”—then claims to derive a theory that explains all motion in the universe from them.[xxiii] Yet a problem with such a formalistic methodology is that the content of our experience is subordinated to this prior structure. As a result, there is no possibility for change in the structure of our basic understanding of the physical world due to novelties that we may encounter. Indeed, eventually physicists at the beginning of the twentieth century had to begin rethinking the basic assumptions of physics because the orbit of Mercury did not match the motion predicted by Newton’s theory. Seemingly, Kant is unable to account for what T. S. Kuhn called “paradigm shifts” in science.[xxiv] Kant’s epistemology thus contrasts with any historically sensitive view of human experience and systems of knowledge because we know that there have been seismic shifts in the scientific worldview even since Kant wrote his Critique (for example, the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries, the discovery of quantum physics, and so on). To allow for dialectical contradiction is to permit the dynamic interaction of our lived experience and preconceived systems of knowledge. Speaking in more general terms, it provides the formal possibility of fundamental transformations in our collective (self)-understanding.
Although there are many iterations of dialectics after Kant and Hegel, what we have discussed is the locus classicus of that notion. Such a vantage point provides the basis to investigate extensions and renovations of this original conception (for example, Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School, Slavoj Žižek, and so on) with a clear idea of what it means to think through rather than against contradiction.
§ 2: The Uses and Misuses of the Dialectic
Now that we have seen precisely what the dialectic is, I shall now briefly explain some things that the dialectic is not. In particular, dialectical thinking is not reducible to a formula. A popular example of this is the claim that the dialectic means “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”; in other words, I posit a proposition A; then, I juxtapose this proposition to its negation, not-A. Then, to resolve this apparent contradiction, as the caricature continues, I simply need to synthesise the two statements into a new statement that unites both their qualities. Though such ratiocinations may be found in some of Kant’s writings and in the work of his successor, J. G. Fichte, this mechanical line of reasoning bears no resemblance to the kind of contradiction we discussed above. This is because dialectical contradiction does not derive from an external opposition between a proposition and its negation but rather from an internal opposition within the structure of our cognition and the process of understanding our experience.
Misunderstandings of this kind abound in popular literature. Arguably, this is due to Friedrich Engels’ popularisation of dialectics, as he, unlike his long-time collaborator Marx, was not well-versed in philosophy and certainly not the high abstractions of Kant and Hegel.[xxv] Yet because many in the workers’ movement saw Engels as the expositor of the logic of history, his ideas have exerted an undue influence on the public’s apprehension of classical German philosophy. Such rigid formulas as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” are repeated by Engels in his works Anti-Dühring (1877) and Dialectics of Nature (1883), in which he elaborates on binary oppositions such as “quality and quantity” or “concrete and abstract.” The problem with these oppositions is that they seek to derive contradiction from purely formal properties, whereas, as we have seen, dialectical contradictions emerge from the tension between empirical content and its formal mediation. Instead of the static formulas of formal logic, dialectical logic proceeds from a dynamic conception of reasoning. And this difference is already clear in Kant’s earlier distinction between the understanding and reason.
Another misconception is that dialectical reasoning simply ignores or violates the basic rules of standard formal logic. Does not the principle of non-contradiction clearly oppose such reasoning? It is not, however, the case that dialectics is an alternative to formal logic, but rather that the validity of such rules is circumscribed to the realm of the understanding; indeed, neither Kant nor Hegel wish to deny the deductive universality of formal systems. It is, in fact, one of the major aims of their philosophies to ensure the validity of such methods for natural science. Yet the universality of the principle of non-contradiction becomes problematic when I consider myself as a reflective subject; in other words, “when I do not just focus direct attention upon formal propositions or contents, but, rather, think through the relationship between these moments themselves—then I actually find that the form in which they can be grasped is solely and precisely the form of contradiction itself rather than the form of blank identity.”[xxvi] In other words, if I limit myself to formal logic, then anything can be grasped through “blank identity” because it is subsumed by the overarching categories of my understanding. However, if I step back from these preconceived formal categories and recognise their tension with the contents of my experience, then I grasp that content not as an isolated instance in the world but rather as something whose characteristics are intimately connected to my limited understanding. This view does not ignore the rule of non-contradiction but sees it as limited to the experience of finite consciousness that has not yet reflected on its particular assumptions. One must, therefore, recognise that dialectics is a critical and reflective form of thinking. Rather than an alternative to formal logic, dialectical logic is a higher synthesis. As such, the bounds of formal logic limit dialectics without effacing its dynamic characteristics. With this in mind, it should be clear that dialectics is not an anti-scientific form of philosophical reasoning but rather represents a consolidation and extension of the principles of Enlightenment rationalism and science. Put differently, although the rules of logic and scientific inquiry are valid as far as our experience is concerned, dialectical philosophy additionally reflects upon the assumptions and structures of knowledge implicit in those investigations.
Now that we have some understanding of the most common misconceptions of the dialectic, we must naturally ask ourselves: Why should we even interest ourselves with such an abstract idea? Is metaphysics, at least in the classical sense, not already long dead? When so much goes wrong with the world today, is there not something unjustifiable about concerning ourselves with such other-worldly, ivory-tower concepts? While I do think there are several valid responses to these equally valid questions, here I shall only deal with one possible proposal, to which we now turn.
I think that the most relevant aspect of dialectical thinking for us today is its ability to dissuade and dismantle the pretensions of identity thinking. What is identity thinking? Put simply, it is the tendency to treat things, individuals, or groups as possessing fixed essences. Using Kant’s earlier terminology, identity thinking is the function of the understanding, which generalises and orders things according to a rigid structure of knowledge. Take a Queenslander and a New South Welshman, for example. Although there may certainly be empirical differences between two such individuals (for example, they grew up in different environments, local musicians produced different styles of music, different states have different political histories, and so on), a problem arises when we treat someone as essentially a Queenslander or fundamentally as a New South Welshman. In more concrete terms, I make a basic philosophical error when I treat someone as substantially separate from myself rather than acknowledging the shared context of our existence as living and social beings. The former perspective is that of the understanding, where the world appears as a series of objects that are to be systematically classified according to some criterion. This results in the effacement of singular characteristics in favour of subsuming individuals under broad categories. In this context, the difference between myself (a Queenslander) and a New South Welshman appears as a simple opposition: I am Q; they are not-Q. The problem with limiting philosophical thinking to such a view is that we eliminate the dynamic, process-oriented aspects of living beings and social relationships. Such a rigid view is not only the source of narcissistic tensions among individuals but also the basic source of attitudes that are sexist, racist, and so on. To treat something or someone as essentially separate from oneself is to deny the shared world in which we exist as living beings.
By contrast, dialectics does not reduce thinking to the rigid categories of the understanding that are ruled by identity. As we saw above, a dialectical philosophy reflects upon the tension between our categories and the particulars that we experience. From a limited perspective, there is a clear distinction between the Queenslander and a New South Welshman because this opposition is established by the preconceived notions of my finite understanding. Unreflected, this static opposition appears perfectly justified. Similarly, Adorno writes that the question: “What is German? … presupposes an autonomous collective entity, ‘German,’ whose characteristics are then determined after the fact.”[xxvii] In other words, the rigid categories of the understanding can only understand individuals insofar as they belong to a generalisable identity that subsumes their particular qualities. However common this may be, Adorno identifies the dangerous consequences of such a view:
The fabrication of national collectivities, however, – common practice in the abominable jargon of war which speaks of the Russian, the American, and certainly also of the German – is the mark of a reified consciousness … Such fabrication remains within precisely those stereotypes which it is the task of thinking to dissolve. It is uncertain whether there even is such a thing as the German person or a specifically German quality or anything analogous in other nations. The True and the Better in every people is much more likely that which does not adapt itself to the collective subject but, wherever possible, even resists it. The fabrication of stereotypes, on the other hand, promotes collective narcissism. Those qualities with which one identifies oneself – the essence of one’s own group – imperceptibly become the Good; the foreign group, the other.[xxviii]
Therefore, if we step back from the identity view and take the position of reflective thought (that is, the position of Reason), we see that the distinction between a Queenslander and a New South Welshman only arises from a finite consciousness that assumes Queenslanders and New South Welshmen are stable and fixed categories. A dialectical view then can grasp the tension between what is perceived by the finite understanding (for example, merely some New South Welshman) and the particular qualities of the individual who does not fit into such a stereotype. Because dialectics grasps all identities as the products of contradiction, it demonstrates that no one person is defined by a group denomination. Rather, it emphasises the contradictions between someone’s actual qualities and their group identification in order to relativise the power of such binary approaches. This is why, for Adorno, dialectics “does not adapt itself to the collective subject but, wherever possible, even resists it.”[xxix] Such a perspective allows one to open themselves to new experiences that cannot be captured by a presupposed structure of knowledge and thus disrupt any dogmatic ideological configuration that seeks to reify individuals or groups into an abstract, homogeneous identity.
Let us briefly recapitulate our discussion. First, I motivated Kant’s terminological distinctions in light of Hume’s sceptical critique of dogmatic metaphysics. Establishing the basic structure of Kant’s theory of knowledge enabled us to appreciate his desire to impose limits on the claims of knowledge. If we limit our knowledge claims to experience, then we do not make a methodological error when we assert that there are necessary relations among objects, because that necessity derives from the cognitive structure of our mind. Despite the ingenuity of Kant’s solution, I emphasised the tension between his universalistic criteria for knowledge and the strictures of the bounds of reason. To resolve such tension, I presented the notion of dialectical contradiction as it emerges from the distinction between the limited perspective of the understanding and the higher perspective of reason. However, unlike Kant—who externalises these contradictions as misuses of reason—I outlined how a dialectical view holds that contradiction is innate to the active process of experience and understanding. This ultimately provided the basis for a dynamic conception of epistemology. By emphasising the structural features of Kant’s epistemology, I hope to have demonstrated its importance for appreciating the precise context in which dialectics originally emerged. With this context in mind, I clarified why dialectics is neither reducible to nor in contradiction with the static formulas of formal logic; rather, dialectics is an instrument that consolidates the formal aspects of Enlightenment rationalism to expand our powers of self-reflection. Yet while dialectics may be considered a tool for critical thinking, we have also seen that it serves as a way to avoid identity thinking. Instead, a dialectical approach helps us to appreciate the particular qualities of individuals that remain irreducible to whatever group in which they are included. In a world ridden with crises that give rise to anxieties about one’s belonging, which in turn lead to increasingly rigid views of self-identity, it is to the dialectic that we can look to disassemble such dangerous and alienating ways of thinking and acting. Though modern dialectical thinking may have begun in the nineteenth century, one finds its reflexive approach in more recent movements such as feminist philosophy, Marxism, and phenomenology. Unfortunately, I will not have room in this essay to discuss such significant contemporary incarnations of critical self-reflection. I nonetheless hope to have inspired the reader to pursue dialectical thought with a clearer understanding of its original context and basic meaning in mind.
Jacob recently completed his BArts (Honours) in German studies, which involved writing a thesis on Immanuel Kant and Bernard Bolzano. His interests include classical German philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics, 20th-century French philosophy, and contemporary continental philosophy. Jacob intends to begin his PhD in 2025 on a comparative study of the work of Alain Badiou and German idealism.
ENDNOTES
[i] I do not claim to present a neutral interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, as the secondary literature divides between deflationary and metaphysical interpretations. To thus avoid a lengthy discussion of the secondary literature, I have drawn my analysis of Kant’s transcendental idealism principally from Lucy Allais’s book Manifest Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Her work is advantageous for a short presentation of Kant such as this because she unites aspects of both the deflationary and metaphysical interpretations. For those interested in a review of the prevailing interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism, see Karl Ameriks, “Recent Work on Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1982): 1-24.
[ii] See, for example, Plato, The Republic, 2nd ed., trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1974), 265.
[iii] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 30-31.
[iv] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Penguin Publications, 2007), B20.
[v] T. W. Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 62.
[vi] For a discussion on Kant’s ironically uncritical view of the indubitable nature of mathematical truths, see Allais, Manifest Reality, 184.
[vii] It should be noted that Kant uses the term Erfahrung for “experience,” which has a sense closer to empirical knowledge as that found in natural science, whereas the ordinary English term “experience” most often refers to our conscious awareness of the world.
[viii] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A19-A20/B33-34.
[ix] Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),159.
[x] Allais, Manifest Reality, 152-153.
[xi] Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1966), 93.
[xii] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B138.
[xiii] Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 104.
[xiv] Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 104.
[xv] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A127–128, A218/B266.
[xvi] Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 22.
[xvii] Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 62.
[xviii] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A296/B352.
[xix] Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 66.
[xx] Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 67.
[xxi] This criticism was first made in G. E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus, oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie, ed. A. Liebert (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1912), 309-312.
[xxii] Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 67.
[xxiii] Gary Hatfield, “Kant on the Perception of Space (and Time),” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63.
[xxiv] T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
[xxv] Tom Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 53.
[xxvi] Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 67.
[xxvii] T. W. Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’,” trans. Thomas Levin. New German Critique, no. 36 (1985): 121. https://doi.org/10.2307/488305.
[xxviii] Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’,” 121.
[xxix] Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’,” 121.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, T. W. “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’” Translated by Thomas Levin. New German Critique, no. 36 (1985): 121–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/488305.
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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. London: Penguin Publications, 2007.
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Plato. The Republic. 2nd. ed. Translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin, 1974.
Rockmore, Tom. In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Schulze, G. E. Aenesidemus, oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1912.
Strawson, Peter. The Bounds of Sense. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1966.
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