Georg W.F. Hegel

A sketch of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s life narrative gives us a sort of a background to the person he was. The dialectic is not Hegel’s invention. “Dialectic” originates from the Greek “dialektos”, meaning “discourse” or “conversation”. Hegel claims that theses are inherently dialectical in the sense that within a single thesis, its contradictory emerges. His “contradictory” pairs are not true contradictions. For Hegel, the dialectic is the means by which concepts dynamically evolve through history and are active determinants of historical development. To some extent, Hegel’s overall dialectical scheme of “affirmation–negation–negation of negation” is versatile enough to have a broad applicatory function in contexts marked conceptually by dialectical opposites. Logic dialectically progresses through concrete Nature, and then both abstract Logic and inert Nature are synthesized in Spirit/Mind.