Dialectics

This chapter focuses on dialectics. It includes a non-specialist introduction to the topic and a brief survey of four dialectical thinkers who are relevant to the project we are undertaking: Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The discussion outlines their positions without oversimplifying them to the point of distortion. They provide summaries to help orient readers to the presentation’s main contentions. In addition, this chapter offers a comparative treatment of Shaw and Ricoeur that makes three main points. First, the pair’s characteristic mode of thinking is not only dialectical but also dialectical in the same manner. Second, the dialectical thinking Shaw and Ricoeur share is the preferred methodology the two utilize to formulate their congruent worldviews, which include agreement on the pressing issues they each deem the most urgent confronting humankind. Third, this same common dialectic drives the parallel lifelong projects Shaw and Ricoeur undertake to make the world a better place than they initially encountered. The methodology is implicated, either explicitly or implicitly, in everything substantial they thought, wrote, and did. Moreover, the chapter characterizes dialectics as a mediating process which, if productively executed, theoretically resolves conceptual conflicts that challenge public servants or jeopardize social stability. It does so, when successful, by synthesizing opposites in tension, by incorporating the strengths of colliding polarities and discarding their weaknesses so that an augmented—and presumably more efficient and arguably humane—conceptual framework emerges.