Abstract

Dialectic has been rejected or dogmatically accepted by many philosophers. The modern history of dialectic began with Kant who, however, regarded it as deceptive. Fichte and Schelling contributed to the formation of the theory of dialectic by developing the concepts such as the absolute, spirit, reason and speculation. Hegel did the further clarification of those concepts by exhibiting their necessary interconnection, which was systematically expounded in Science of Logic. Dialectic in Logic can be grasped with three key concepts: the absolute, contradiction and sublation, and the identity of thought and being. In Logic, through the doctrines of being, essence and the concept, the necessary development of categories is expressed as the selfmovement of the absolute, which culminates in the absolute idea. Logic is for Hegel the exposition of God as the thought which thinks of itself. Therefore the truth of logic is the thought's returning to itself as a full circle of the descriptions of thought itself. Dialectic is the activity of this self-thinking thought. Contradiction immanent in every category, and its sublation, is the generator of all the development of categories. Only through the whole process of logic can the identity of thought and being be known as the truth. However, as the later generations argued, Hegel's interpretations was biased as his emphasis was on the self-identity of thought to itself. Dialectic is to be re-grasped with the emphasis on the self-development of reality. This entails the cognition that the reality enforces the human mind to recognise the dynamism of ever-moving reality that is dialectical. However, dialectic is not to be regarded as the collection of principles, but to be re-conceptualised as the necessary development, and thus the explication, of reality through our thought. Dialectic is this truth as the identity of reality and thought.