Search Results

A polarity takes place at the deepest possible level, the acceptance or rejection of what is often considered the fundamental principle of rational thinking—the law of noncontradiction. This law, which (roughly) tells us that it is not possible for something to both be and not be, or for something to possess a quality yet lack it, can strike one as so fundamental that it seems inconceivable that anyone would reject it. Yet it has been rejected, by Heracleitus (at least as some read him), by Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Walt Whitman, and by Friedrich Nietzsche, among others. In postmodernist circles it is considered a mark of naivete to accept the law of noncontradiction. The dispute between the traditional defenders of the law and its traditional opponents is grounded in a shared misconception of the status of this law—a misconception that yields perhaps the most fundamental radical choice of all. With this shared misconception in place, the dispute is intractable. Unfortunately, the misconception is extremely difficult to dislodge. This chapter tells this story.

This chapter focuses on Johann Gottlieb Fichte as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s immediate predecessor and the second volume of Science of Logic, in which Hegel introduces book 2 on Wesen. It first analyzes Hegel’s general doctrine of the shift from being to essence on the one hand, and from essence to the concept on the other, before turning to Fichte’s account of reflection in his Wissenschaftslehre or Doctrine of Science (1794). In particular, it examines Fichte’s attempts to correct the defect of Immanuel Kant’s version of Kantianism through an intellectual intuition of the working transcendental ego. The chapter then considers Fichte’s notion of the human being before concluding with a discussion of Fichte and Hegel’s search for a version of the law of noncontradiction based on both identity and difference.

This chapter also deals with the law of noncontradiction but has a different tendency. Following Wittgenstein, it actually defends a number of seemingly antirationalist theses, among them that inconsistency does not always render a system useless, that consistency is not always the most important goal of inquiry, and that it might be wholly unreasonable to suppose that human beings will ever be able to attain a view of the world that is both suitably rich and completely consistent. None of this is intended to show that the law of noncontradiction is false. But if correct, it does seem to show that inevitably human beings must live their intellectual lives in the neighborhood of absurdity.

This chapter discusses the different aspects of dialectics. Dialectics are opposing forces leading to change in a system. The two laws of dialectics are the law of unity of opposites and the law of noncontradiction. The law of unity of opposites states that the nature of everything involves internal opposition or contradiction. The law of noncontradiction states that two antithetical propositions cannot both be true and cannot exist at the same time and have the same meaning. The chapter further describes the relationship of dialectics with the system and gives an overview on how dialectics can be used in therapy.