Lonergan on Dialectic

Lonergan on Dialectic:

“THE DIALECT OF COMMUNITY

The name, dialectic, has been employed in a variety of meanings. In Plato, it denoted the art of philosophic dialogue and was contrasted with eristic. In Aristotle, it referred to an effort to discover clues to the truth by reviewing and scrutinizing the opinions of others. For the Schoolmen, it became the application of logical rules to public disputation. Hegel employed the word to refer to his triadic process from the concept of being to the Absolute Idea. Marx inverted Hegel and so conceived as dialectical a non-mechanical, materialist process. Summarily, then, dialectic denotes a combination of the concrete, the dynamic, and the contradictory; but this combination may be found in a dialogue, in the history of philosophic opinions, or in historical process generally.

For the sake of greater precision, let us say that a dialectic is a concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change. Thus, there will be a dialectic, if

(1) there is an aggregate of events of determinate character,

(2) the events may be traced to either or both of two principles,

(3) the principles are opposed yet bound together, and

they are modified by the changes that successively result from them.”

Bernard Lonergan
Insight
Philosophical Library Inc.
New York
1956