Dialectician

“ In a word, you could see that the rhetorician is despised and of no account, while the dialecticians are courted and treated with every respect, because in their ratiocinations there is always something obscure and intricate, and hence it results that the disciple always hangs upon his master and is his slave, held fast bound with a kind of everlasting fetter. ”

“ As in the Cratylus, the legislator has 'the dialectician standing on his right hand;' so in the Statesman, the king or statesman is the dialectician, who, although he may be in a private station, is still a king. ”

“ Please to observe that they can only be fairly judged when compared with what is meet; and yet not with what is meet for producing pleasure, nor even meet for making discoveries, but for the great end of developing the dialectical method and sharpening the wits of the auditors. He who censures us, should prove that, if our words had been fewer, they would have been better calculated to make men dialecticians. ”

“ And thus experience taught me a manifest conclusion that, whereas dialectic furthers other studies, so if it remain by itself it lies bloodless and barren, nor does it quicken the soul to yield fruit of philosophy, except the same conceive from elsewhere. ”

“ It ground and sharpened the dialectic implements of our race as perhaps nothing but discussions, in the result of which men thought their eternal no less than their temporal interests were at stake, could have done. ”

“ When will mankind be aware of the uniformity, of the importance, of truth? When will they cease to confound, by sexual, by political, by theological, distinctions, those immutable principles, which form the true basis of virtue and happiness? The paltry expedients of combating error with error, and prejudice with prejudice, in one invariable and melancholy circle, have already been sufficiently tried, have already been demonstrated futile:—they have armed man against man, and filled the world with crimes, and with blood.—How has the benign and gentle nature of Reform been mistated! ”

“ They ticketed every portion of man's moral anatomy, found a rule for every possible case of choice, a reason and a reward for every virtue, and a punishment for every conceivable crime; they turned generalisations into laws, and deduced from them as laws the very facts from which they had generalised. They benefited mankind by exercising and training subtle wits, and they reduced dialectics, almost, we might say, logic itself, to absurdity. ”

“ Here, in the infinity of dialectics, and the endless dialectical disputes of an abstract and empty thinking, as well as in the false semblance of a logical necessity which prevails in these logical disputations, lies the source of the second leading error of philosophy. All erroneous systems, whether of philosophy or religion, lie somewhere between these two extremes of false thought. ”

“ But I am sure that the dialectic power is something of the nature which I have described. It is the only force which can make plain the full truth to students who have gone through the preliminary studies that we have described. It is the only study which investigates rationally real forms and essences243 — what each thing is, truly in itself. ”

“ A great master of dialectics once laid it down as a maxim of advocacy, "State the case of your opponent as strongly as you know how, stronger if possible than he states it himself, and then answer it, if you can." ”

“ In the cool moments of reflection, both humanity and philosophy revolt at the diabolical disposition, that has prevailed in almost every country, to persecute such as either from education or principle, from caprice or custom, refuse to subscribe to the religious creed of those, who, by various adventitious circumstances, have acquired a degree of superiority or power. ”

“ If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the 'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked (for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in 'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been tried? ”

“ Against this bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as history, reverence, the love of the land. ”

“ In teaching and learning the dialectics, which embraced metaphysics, jurisprudence, political economy, and even claimed physics for its jurisdiction, the object seemed rather a victory in a war of words and ideas than discoveries of new truths or the establishment of old ones. Hair-splitting and sophistry flourished in all the contests. So useless and even criminal seemed this amazing waste of time to quiet-minded and earnest people, that a legend was current in the twelfth century of a dead scholar appearing to a comrade in a robe of hell all covered with sophisms. ”

“ Gentlemen, whatever be your judgment of to-day or to-morrow upon the modalities of the social order which I have attempted summarily to portray from this tribune, you can not deny that you are here face to face with a doctrine which you may judge rash, which you may judge utopian, vain; but many another doctrine has been judged vain and has been denounced as utopian by the privileged classes on the very eve of their advent in history. ”

“ Out of new sentiments and ideas, not seen as yet, new forms of society will come, free from the antagonism of races, classes, men—representing the American idea in its length, breadth, depth, and height, its beauty and its truth, and then the old civilization of our time shall seem barbarous and even savage. ”

“ From this it follows that dialectic, which is the quickest and most prompt among the hand-maids of eloquence, is of use to each one in proportion to the measure of his knowledge. For it is of most use to him who knows the most and of least use to him who knows little. ”

“ The limit of ideological perfection was to deny ideas; that of metaphysical studies, to deny spirits; that of morals, to deny morality; that of society, to deny authority; that of politics, to establish license; that of religion, to deny God. Thus, human reason, thinking to advance, marched in a retrograde direction ”

“ The good soul, consequently, will not urge a perversion of justice as justice in order to impose upon the commonwealth. Insofar as the soul has its impulse in the right direction, its definitions will agree with the true nature of intelligible things.
There is, then, no true rhetoric without dialectic, for the dialectic provides that basis of “high speculation about nature” without which rhetoric in the narrower sense has nothing to work upon. Yet, when the disputed terms have been established, we are at the limit of dialectic. ”

“ Whatever goes by the different names of the revolutionary, the radical, the democratic, the liberal, the free-thinking, the sceptical, or the negative and critical school or party in religion, politics, or philosophy, all passes with him under the designation of metaphysical, and whatever he has to say about it forms part of his description of the metaphysical school of social science. ”

“ In ordinary times, social and political ideas slumber in uncultured minds in the shape of vague antipathies, restrained aspirations, and fleeting desires. Behold them aroused—energetic, imperious, stubborn, and unbridled. ”

“ The line of argument, the appeals to prejudice, the disregard of facts and the false conclusions, the misrepresentation of past history and the misapprehension of the future, the contempt of reason, of common sense, and common humanity, then laboriously and unscrupulously arrayed in defense of slavery, left nothing for the exercise of the ingenuity of modern orators. ”

“ If we thoughtfully review the course of argument pursued, we shall rest in the following as our sum and ultimatum. The dialectic intellect, by exertion of its own powers exclusively, may enable us to affirm the reality of an absolute Being, generally. ”

“ The difference between the mind which is informed by dialectic, and the mind which is not so informed, is simply this: that the ordinary or uninformed mind has ideas, while the dialectic mind knows that it has them, and understands what they are. ”

“ Again, without dialectics, the wise man cannot be acute, and ingenious, and wary, and altogether dangerous as an arguer. For that it belongs to the same man to speak correctly and to reason correctly, and to discuss properly those subjects which are proposed to him, and to answer readily whatever questions are put to him, all which qualities belong to a man who is skilful in dialectics. This then is a brief summary of their opinions on logic. ”

“ The old local orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important small things of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in the things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixed discordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wide culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no wider understanding has yet replaced them. ”

“ We read history with more or less of prejudice and intolerance, viewing with the bright light of the nineteenth century those blots upon its page, which lay unseen in the early dawn of Christianity. And yet there is no name (but One) in all the records of the past, which we should dare to bring to the test of abstract virtue. ”

“ The active presence of conflicting tendencies not only in politics but in religion and philosophy, during the reign of absolute rulers of the past, showed that they could not box culture within the confines of their dogmas and edicts. ”

“ Then there are beliefs about his class, which, according to his station, is the best socially, or the most intelligent, or the most deserving morally, of the classes in the community—though all are agreed that the first of these merits is more desirable than the second, and the second than the third. Concerning his nation, also, almost every man cherishes comfortable delusions. ”

“ In those stabler days every one with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that doctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used only as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three examples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash assertions about life and race and the tendency of things. ”

“ For the negative, which emerges as the result of dialectic, is, because a result, at the same time the positive: it contains what it results from, absorbed into itself, and made part of its own nature. Thus conceived, however, the dialectical stage has the features characterising the third grade of logical truth, the speculative form, or form of positive reason. ”

“ I have shown in another work how institutions, arts, and languages are modified in passing from one people to another, and how the laws of these transformations differ from the truth as stated in books. I allude to this matter now merely to show why, in examining the subject of democratic ideas, we occupy ourselves so little with the text of doctrines, and seek only for the psychological elements of which they constitute the vestment, and the reactions which they provoke in the various categories of men who have accepted them. ”

“ Hence the familiar idea of the universality, which is identical with the indeterminate character, of any side of human nature; of the political side, for example, or the religious or the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not any particular political status, nor any particular religion, nor any particular body is universal, but the political or the religious or the physiological is universal—as universal, to repeat, as it is indeterminate. Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the lawful or the lawless is universal. ”

“ The point at issue is not that there is talking or doing here or there by certain gentry who imagine that they are making history. The real issue is in the clash of two classes, two interests, two cultures, two conceptions of the world, two moral systems. ”

“ Authority, tradition, and custom are wholly or partially destroyed. And since authority, tradition, and custom are the cement of the social structure, there results a general dissolution of that structure into its component individuals. ”

“ Whatever may now dwell within him,—or, more strictly speaking, whatever he might have acquired in the course of his progressive culture,—he is unable to explain clearly either to himself or others, or to make it the deliberate rule of his actions and thus realize it in the world. He wants the two necessary elements of the true life of the Idea,—clearness and freedom. ”

“ Consequently this form of the reason, which is ever pursuing dialectical disputations, or else skeptically renouncing its own authority, even because it never allows itself to proceed in what alone is its legitimate course, becomes thereby a second source of error and false thinking among men. And, indeed, this erroneous procedure of the dialectical reason, which is incessantly working out or analyzing its abstract notions, is the effect of the present constitution of the human mind ”

“ The very style of dialectical theory is a scandal and abomination to the prevailing standards of language and to the sensibilities molded by those standards, because while it makes concrete use of existing concepts it simultaneously recognizes their fluidity and their inevitable destruction. ”

“ But for the restless spirit of inquiry which was awakened by Greek philosophers, the western nations might still have been slumbering in barbarian ignorance. Ancient dialectics prepared the way for modern progress, by teaching intellect to discipline and comprehend itself, in order that it may accurately scan nature and bind her forces to the car of human welfare. ”