Hegelian Dialectic Quotes

“Die Wahrheit des Seins ist Wesen”
― Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Philosophy of Mind

“Time to silence the Hegelian Dialect”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i.e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i.e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“As Uncle Hegel used to enjoy pointing out, the trouble with perspectives is that they are, by definition, PARTIAL points of view; the Real problems are appreciated only when, in the course of the development of the World Spirit, the limits of perspective come to be transcended. Or, to put it less technically, it helps to be able to see the whole elephant.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind

“The interpenetration of chance and determination bears on the problem of how there can be a scientific approach to society when individual human behavior and consciousness seem unpredictable. Those who despair to point out that people are not machines, that there are subjective processes in the making of decisions, that it is not 'classes' but individuals who make choices. Terms such as "the human factor" or "subjective factors" with their implication of chance and unpredictability are invoked as the negation of regularity and lawfulness. And indeed it is true that individual behavior and consciousness are the consequences of intersection of a large number of weakly determining factors. But it does not follow that where there is choice, subjectivity, and individuality there cannon also be predictability. The error to take the individual as causally prior to the whole and not to appreciate that the social has causal properties within which individual consciousness and action are formed. While the consciousness of an individual is not determined by his/her class position but is influenced by idiosyncratic factors that appear as random, those random factors operate within a domain and with probabilities that are constrained and directed by social forces.”
― Richard C. Lewontin, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, agriculture, and health

“Perhaps, then, observes Hegel, there is an open vista for thought such that human intelligence can, in principle, override all of its self-imposed limits. If so, the argument goes, then there is hope that it may be able to conceptually assimilate all of reality.”
― Micheal Allen Fox

“Spitzfindgikeiten des bloßen Begriffs waren die Gestehungkosten für die Entdeckung der Dialektik, Aristotelisch-Hegelsche Teleologie ging der Tendenz, Augustinisches Sabbatreich dem Reich der Freiheit vorauf. Und nicht zuletzt, ganz zuletzt geht die Aristotelische Deckung des δυνάμει ὄν, des In-Möglichkeit-Seins mit der Materie als tragender Materie jeder utopischen Substraterweiterung der Materie vorher; ob auch der Aristotelische Materie-Begriff in großer Philosophie rückwärts wie großen Teils auf vorwärts oft vereinsamt blieb.”
― Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe der Werke.: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz: Band 7: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz

“For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.”
― Robert Frost, North of Boston