Vince Beiser e Laura Calosso: un saggio e un romanzo sulla sabbia, materiale prezioso

The chief result of the dialectic is that reason is not only a form of mechanical explanation, which shows how one finite thing depends upon another, but also a form of holistic explanation, which shows how all finite things are parts of a wider whole. The fundamental mistake of Jacobi and Kant, in Hegel’s view, was that they understood reason according to a mechanical paradigm of explanation, which understands an event by its prior causes and so on ad infinitum. Since they believed that reason is limited to such a form of explanation, they had to conclude it could never grasp the unconditioned, which is never given in the series of finite causes. They failed to see, however, that reason also has the power to explain the presence of the entire series of causes, to grasp the reason for which it exists in the first place. The inner logic of the understanding ultimately demands that we see both cause and effect, condition and conditioned, as parts of a single indivisible whole.

The basic strategy and idea behind the dialectic is simple, even if its application in specific cases is often very complex. The dialectic arises from an inevitable contradiction in the procedures of the understanding. The understanding contradicts itself because it both separates things, as if they were completely independent of one another, and connects them, as if neither could exist apart from the other. It separates things when it analyzes them into their parts, each of which is given a self-sufficient status; and it connects them according to the principle of sufficient reason, showing how each event has a cause, or how each part inheres in a still smaller part, and so on ad infinitum. Hence the understanding ascribes both independence and dependence to things. The only way to resolve the contradiction, it turns out, is to reinterpret the independent or self-sufficient term as the whole of which all connected or dependent terms are only parts. The mistake of the understanding arose in giving self-sufficient status to a part of the whole; it rectifies its error and resolves its contradiction when it ascends to the standpoint of the whole itself.

The standards, rules and guidelines appropriate to a subject matter should be the result, not the starting point, of the investigation. So, if Hegel has any methodology at all, it appears to be an anti-methodology, a method to suspend all methods.      Hegel’s term for his own anti-methodology is “the concept” (der Begriff), which designates the inherent form of an object, its inner purpose. It is the purpose of enquiry to grasp this inner form, Hegel argues, and it is for this reason that he demands suspending all preconceptions. If the philosopher simply applies his a priori ideas to the subject matter, he has no guarantee that he grasps its inner form or the object as it is in itself; for all he knows, he sees the object only as it is for him. When Hegel uses the term “dialectic” it usually designates the “self-organization” of the subject matter, its “inner necessity” and “inherent movement”. The dialectic is what follows from the concept of the thing. It is flatly contrary to Hegel’s intention, therefore, to assume that the dialectic is an a priori methodology, or indeed a kind of logic, that one can apply to any subject matter. The dialectic is the very opposite: it is the inner movement of the subject matter, what evolves from it rather than what the philosopher applies to it.