Skip over navigation  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
Themes, Arguments, and Ideas   Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapters
1 to 3: “Shapes of Consciousness”  Dialectic as the Fundamental
Pattern of Thought  Before Hegel, the word dialectic referred to
the process of argument and refutation through which
philosophers sought to discover the truth. Plato’s dialogues
offer the prime example. One person advances a proposition or
belief, and Socrates refutes it and shows why that proposition
is wrong, which clears the way for a better, more convincing
argument to take its place. The point of dialectical reasoning,
before Hegel, was to clear away misconceptions and arrive at
first principles—basic, fundamental truths on which we can all
agree and that the philosopher can use as a starting point on
which to base a philosophical system, such as Descartes’ famous
principle that if we’re thinking, we can at least be sure that
we exist.  Hegel used the dialectic for a different purpose than
arriving at first princ