DIALECTICS. — From διαλέγομαι, "I converse." A term frequently used in philosophy, it carries a wide range of meanings. In the sense most common even today, it is the art of reasoning, of developing concepts and judgments according to their logical connection and movement.
In this sense, as Aristotle notes, dialectics goes back to Zeno of Elea, who defended Parmenides' doctrine by discussing and reducing to absurdity the dual Pythagorean conception of the unit-point and infinite divisibility. As the art of arguing both for and against the same thesis (antilogies) and of "making the losing argument win," it is found in the Sophists. In Socrates, dialectics is established as the art of inductive reasoning in the search for definitions. Plato’s dialectics serves the central conception of knowledge as recollection: dialectics is the sum of analytical and synthetic logical processes by which the relationships of coordination and subordination are determined, according to generic and specific values, of the ideas awakened by sensory knowledge (Soph., 253, C, D; Phaedr., 265, F; 266, B, C). And since, in Plato’s system, the ideas constitute the most intimate truth and essence of things, dialectics assumes, within the structure of the system, a meaning that is not merely logical but also concrete and metaphysical. This meaning would later be explicitly reaffirmed in Proclus’ Neoplatonism, where the emanative process of things from the One is understood as a process from the particular to the universal through the three dialectical moments of persistence, emanation, and return—that is, homogeneity, otherness, and the reunion of the particular with the universal. A more distant repercussion of the real meaning of Platonic dialectics, albeit in a different form, would be found in the medieval ultrarrealist position regarding the question of universals.
In Aristotle, dialectics, as opposed to analytics, is the logic of probability: while analytics develops the strictly scientific process of demonstration that proceeds from true and certain principles, dialectics represents rather the attempt to attain truth by starting from common opinions or generally accepted principles and subjecting them to the test of criticism through reasoning and disputation: "what philosophy knows, dialectics attempts" (Met., IV, 2, 1004 b 25; Top., I, 1, 100 a 27, b 21; Anal. post., I, 2, 71 b. Cf. A. Trendelenburg, *Elementa logicae Arist.*, Berlin 1892, pp. 108-10). Thus, in the technical Aristotelian sense, dialectics assumes a purely logical, well-defined meaning, which appears as a limit in comparison with Plato’s position.
With the Stoics, and later in Scholasticism, dialectics expands to encompass all formal logic, or the science of deduction and reasoning—that which, in medieval *scholia*, constituted the second discipline of the trivium alongside rhetoric. The development that dialectics, so understood, underwent in the Middle Ages was immense, especially due to the intense interest aroused around the question of universals. There were also significant reflections in theological science, where, with St. Anselm and Abelard, the dialectical method was firmly introduced, not without some excesses, and was later skillfully tempered by St. Thomas. The equation dialectics = formal logic is still fairly common today in Neoscholastic treatises.
During the Renaissance, as the devaluation of Aristotelian-medieval syllogistics intensified, dialectics took on a new meaning: in P. Ramus, and later more openly in Valla and Agricola, dialectics drew closer to rhetoric—*"ars dialectica"* is the art of speaking well, *"ars disserendi,"* a tool for oratory.
For Kant, dialectics, as purely formal logic, since it teaches nothing about the content of knowledge and thus does not extend our actual knowledge, is a sophistical verbal game, pure logic of illusion and appearance (*Kritik der r. Vernunft*, Italian trans. by G. Gentile, Bari 1940, pp. 89-99). Alongside this pejorative sense, Kant calls the second part of his logic "transcendental dialectics," in the sense of a critique of the understanding and reason with respect to their use beyond the phenomenal (ibid., p. 100): it resolves into a search for the paralogisms and contradictions into which metaphysical human thought necessarily falls.
With post-Kantian absolute idealism, dialectics regains an essential metaphysical meaning in the conception of reality. In Fichte, dialectics is the rhythm of the activity of the Ego, unfolded in the three indissolubly linked and mutually conditioned moments of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Every position (thesis) of the Ego generates, through its very development, an opposing moment (antithesis), which in turn opens into a higher moment (synthesis), and so on endlessly in the process of cosmic self-consciousness. Thus understood, dialectics is rooted in the very metaphysical structure of self-consciousness, which, in determining itself as "I," necessarily posits the "non-I"; and it has a deeper exigency in the essential ethical nature of the Ego, which demands, as a tool for its realization, nature (the non-I). It then constitutes the substance of every spiritual process, and insofar as every conceptual position, indeed every position of consciousness, if not stimulated by the antithesis to open into higher moments, exhausts itself in itself, in spiritual inertia and stagnation.
In Hegel, dialectics is the eternal immanent movement of thought toward the construction of rational reality through the continuous overcoming of its inner contradiction. This dialectical nature, by which the spirit passes from affirmation through negation to a new synthesis in a higher concept, is the very intrinsic nature, the driving soul of thought and thus of the world: "in its peculiar character, dialectics is the true and proper nature of intellectual determinations, of finite things in general" (*Enzykl. der philos. Wissenschaften*, Italian trans. by B. Croce, Bari 1923, § 81, p. 84; cf. § 11, p. 15). B. Croce, while accepting Hegel’s dialectics in part, sees it as vitiated by a fundamental error, in that it treats opposing concepts (good-evil) and distinct concepts (good-truth) alike; for the latter, according to Croce, the dialectic of opposites does not apply, but rather the connection of distinct concepts: that is, concepts that are merely distinct stand in relation to one another as a lower degree to a higher, which the spirit attains without annulling the previous one (cf. *Saggio sullo Hegel*, Bari 1913, pp. 58, 60). G. Gentile also considers Hegel’s dialectics insufficient, in that it retains a residue of reference to thought as being thought (a defect, according to Gentile, common to all other dialectics, beginning with Plato’s and Aristotle’s), rather than fixing itself in the being of thought as act. Gentile aims to achieve this rigorous conceptual purity beyond the dialectic of the thought that preserves within its own field all its value—his own dialectic, understood as the eternal immanent process of the self-conscious Act through the three moments of subjectivity (art), objectivity (religion, science), and their synthesis (philosophy): the dialectical process of thought that constitutes at once the true and essential dialectic of the real, since true and concrete reality is nothing other than thought in act (cf. *Teoria generale dello spirito*, 5th ed., Florence 1938, ch. 4, pp. 39-57).
In existentialism, both in Kierkegaard and in contemporary thinkers, dialectics is affirmed as the method of existential philosophy (cf. L. Lavelle, *La dialectique de l'éternelle présence*, I, *De l'être* [Paris 1928]; II, *De l'acte* [ibid. 1937]).
Beyond these strictly technical meanings, whose legitimacy depends on the value of their respective metaphysical systems, the term *dialettica* (dialectic) has today assumed a varied and manifold meaning and field of employment, to which the universal value conferred upon it by idealism has largely contributed. There are, first of all, derivations based on the ancient meaning, according to which every progressive logical-conceptual development of thought from a concept, a judgment, or a fact toward the conclusions it implies is called *dialettica*: in this sense, one speaks, for example, of the *dialettica* of being, of experience, of consciousness. From this field, which might be called logical-real, *dialettica* is transferred, as if by an inverse movement, to the real-logical field, so that every development of reality, of facts, of phenomena that occurs in dependence on and according to the schema of a logical process—however metaphysically conceived, whether immanent (idealism) or transcendent (realism) to reality itself—is called *dialettica*. It is in this sense that one speaks, for example, of the *dialettica* of history, of culture, of civilization, of life, etc.
The conception of Christian philosophy does not in any way intend to deny such concrete dialectical character of the world, of history, of civilization, and, in general, of being in its actualization and becoming; but it places the determining logical schema in the order of intrinsic finality that is realized and unfolds in every created being according to the archetypal design of transcendent Rationality, not excluding even the extraordinary manifestations—particularly in the economy of rational creatures—of its liberal and sovereign Providence.
For the application of *dialettica* to the socio-economic field, V. MATERIALISMO STORICO.