Tommi Juhani Hanhijärvi holds a PhD in Philosophy from Berlin’s Humboldt University and has an M.A. in Philosophy and History. He has taught at the university and secondary school levels and has published several books in English focusing on Socrates, Logic and related subjects. Tommi is also a pseudonymous fiction author.

In the later nineteenth century logic became a rigorous discipline in eliminating the need of human interpretations or intuitions (primarily due to Frege). This is why logic is now so widely automated.

Dr. Hanhijärvi sets out the...

In the later nineteenth century logic became a rigorous discipline in eliminating the need of human interpretations or intuitions (primarily due to Frege). This is why logic is now so widely automated.

Dr. Hanhijärvi sets out the framework for a historical review of dialectics. In his Introduction he provides the overall setting for the book, borrowing heavily from Marcuse but introducing several formal examples of both AI and dialectics that are not familiar from Marcuse’s texts.

The next chapter examines Plato. This ancient Greek philosopher was not the first dialectician but he was the first comparatively systematic one, unifying strands from predecessors like Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Socrates.

It was not normal in the Greece of his day to say that men and women, and the rich as well as slaves, or both youths and adults, were to exemplify the same virtues (aretai), for rather the Greeks normally said that, e.g., slaves and women had other obligations and different rights. But Plato’s idealization of virtue led him to require equal results from all. In general, the bottom line is that perfectionistic thought rules the roost: we are not simply to conform mechanically to whatever laws or conventions there happen to be. Nothing less than perfect consistency suffices, and the examined life consists of a search for a utopia of this kind.

Next, we examine the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant was the father of German Idealism and Romanticism because he transported Plato’s cosmic Ideas into the human mind.

Finally, Dr. Hanhijärvi introduces Hegel, the major German Idealist after Kant. He was the least inhibited dialectician, but to some readers he is also the most inspiring. Hegel formulates what he calls a "logic" but its meaning is dialectical. Hegel is the major German Idealist after Kant. He is the least inhibited dialectician, but at least to some readers he will also be the most inspiring. He formulates what he calls a “logic� but its meaning is dialectical. In Hegel’s logic all but the most complete examples of justice are contradictory, because they are in part unjust. However justice is not all he has in mind, and he uses a vast variety of examples for his dialectics. These he draws from the world’s arts, religions, and philosophies as well as morals and politics.

Tommi unravels the specialized language and thought processes that make each of these thinkers great, and he shows what we can learn by pondering the issues they examine.

Dialectical reasoning can at first seem wild and outlandish, and especially in its more radical versions it is already being ignored rather consistently in many college lectures and textbooks. However if there is a serious accusation against it then this must be that it lacks the rigor of modern science and computation. In response, dialecticians should not flatter themselves or hide in esoteric conventions. Rather, they should openly reveal why dialectics still have the kind of liberating and critical power which their adherents have advertised through the centuries. The book argues that this demands generative principles, not ancient keywords or outmoded Zeitgeists.

Excerpt from the Introduction

After Bach, musicologists have been busy trying to explain his know-how, and my musicologist friend tells me that this is so even today. They can hear from Bach’s work that there is more to map. More things fit together than has hitherto been explained. But all the great dialecticians are like Bach! Each is another genius, another intuitive creator who spins out coherent patterns which he never names or defines. On this comparison I am the ‘musicologist’ who runs after the heroes and tries to keep up, explaining their magic away and imparting their skills to the people.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

Chapter 1. 

The book begins with Socrates, the archetypal questioner in philosophy, religion, ethics, and politics. He questions all his fellow Athenians, young and old, rich and poor, because he holds them to a higher standard of self-knowledge. The democracy’s population is too concerned with petty things. However Socrates is not exactly elaborate about his standard, and his famously ironic version of it is both skeptical and paradoxical:...

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

Chapter 1. 

The book begins with Socrates, the archetypal questioner in philosophy, religion, ethics, and politics. He questions all his fellow Athenians, young and old, rich and poor, because he holds them to a higher standard of self-knowledge. The democracy’s population is too concerned with petty things. However Socrates is not exactly elaborate about his standard, and his famously ironic version of it is both skeptical and paradoxical: he says he knows only that he does not know. More seriously and literally he does need to know his divine ideal or he cannot consistently seek it or sell it. As he realizes this, he is led in time to formulate a doctrine of innate Ideas.

Chapter 2. 

This takes us to Plato, whose middle and later period works feature ’Socrates’ only as his mouthpiece. This new ’Socrates’ does not only question others but presents most of the answers too. But the answers are in many ways the seminal ones for all later periods: they are the boldest ever known. The human psyche is immortal and separate from the body, and it naturally strives to know and live by the archetypal and eternal Ideas. In his later phase Plato extends his dialectical reasoning even to the natural cosmos, saying that the regular orbits of the planets and stars have something in them of the perfect self-mover, God (theos), their origin and model. In Plato’s different stages, both God and the Ideas function as blueprints for utopias (Atlantis, Magnesia, and Kallipolis). However after him the mainstream tradition in Western thought turns downward, and already with Aristotle, his main pupil, the Ideas, free souls, and social utopias are all shot down. After the Dark Ages the Renaissance experimentalists strive to return to Plato and dialectics but their results remain sketchy.

Chapter 3. 

The real Renaissance of dialectics begins some centuries later with the German Idealist Immanuel Kant. Like no one else Kant understands how radically the operations of modern natural science differ from the dialectical questioning of the Greeks. Dialecticians cannot compete with scientists in testable laws and useful technologies, he knows, but their business is not about empirical facts or realities in the first place. For Ideas are ideals, and dialectical reasoning is always about what there ought to be and not what there already is. (Otherwise it ends in Kant’s ’antinomies’ or ’paralogisms’.) For their part science and technology are powerless in this higher and purer realm, for they are always bound to earthbound facts. All unconditionally moral or philosophical principles, all leading questions, all high culture and art will always need to be dialectical and not technocratic, Kant teaches. This leads him to formulate a hard and systematic duality between higher and lower reasoning (Vernunft and Verstand).

Chapter 4. 

Finally this book introduces the last of the great idealists, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who writes a generation after Kant. Hegel’s contribution to the dialectical tradition is to expand its historical and comparative horizons to other continents and customs. In ancient cultures many humans are still like children, he writes, because they need their Ideas and principles in myths, pictures, and ceremonies. This continues until the mature adulthood of the species, when we can finally reason about everything directly and simply. Logically the point is that history marches forward because by and large humans learn in time to live more freely and consciously by increasingly higher laws. (’Theses’ and ’antitheses’ lead to ’syntheses’, in Hegelese.) Eventually this spells the end of history and art, Hegel writes, and now God is dead. But after Hegel’s death fresh questions sprout up once more.