And if we look at, all of these data points from yet another angle, we can account for all of these with one single theory or one single explanation.” And Hegel called that the synthesis. There’s a grain of truth to both of these theories. There are pros and cons to both of these perspectives. If we take both of these explanations into account, we can actually integrate them. What also happens is someone else comes along and says, “Now, wait a minute. So now, we have two competing theories in operation here. And from Hegel’s scheme, this was called the antithesis. So, this person comes up with their own theory. So now, this is how everyone tends to understand this particular phenomenon or data points.īut then inevitably, what happens is someone else comes along and notices maybe some outliers or a different set of observations or some additional data points that the original theory doesn’t account for. The thesis becomes the prevailing paradigm. And they come up with a theory and that theory is the thesis. So first of all, Hegel noticed that someone generally tends to come up with some good idea or an explanation to account for some kind of phenomenon or a set of observations or maybe some data points. Really, this is how all human knowledge tends to evolve.Īnd in particular, Hegel developed this three-pronged scheme to explain how human knowledge tends to evolve dialectically. So, what Hegel realized was it wasn’t just Socrates and his students that learned to be dialectical, it wasn’t just people that studied the discipline of philosophy that learned to be dialectical. Now, Hegel’s contribution to dialectics was that he applied this concept beyond philosophy to all academic disciplines. To this day, we still call this technique the Socratic method, and it’s still a great technique to use in counseling.īut now, let’s fast forward to the 1700s, 1800s, to a German philosopher named Hegel. He simply did that by asking them question after question after question. And he was so good at this teaching style that he could actually get his students to the point of articulating the exact opposite viewpoint of where they started. The purpose of his questions was to help his students see things from different perspectives. (2018). The Socratic method of psychotherapy. Columbia University Press. Socrates taught his students not by giving them the answers but instead by simply asking them questions. And Socrates was famous for his teaching style. The term probably existed before Socrates, but he was the one that made the term popular within philosophical circles. So, like I mentioned, dialectics comes from philosophy and it was actually originally Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, who popularized this term dialectics. And dialectics is especially about changing your mind when presented with new information, in other words, the ability to update your cognitive map so to speak. It’s also about seeing things from someone else’s perspective or maybe seeing things from different angles in your own head. Dialectics is about finding a middle path. On a practical level, dialectics is all about this idea of balanced thinking or flexible thinking or nuanced thinking or maybe seeing the shades of gray or letting go of extremes. So, the idea of dialectics is, two things that seem like opposites can actually sometimes both be true at the same time. If you remember from the previous video, we defined dialectics as this idea of bringing together opposites, in other words looking at things from new or different perspectives. So, like we mentioned in the previous video, dialectics is actually a term borrowed from philosophy. Marsha Linehan applied this concept to mental health. In this video, we will define dialectics and explore the roots of this term in philosophy, first with Socrates and then with Hegel. Welcome to the second video in this module.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |