Dialectic

Mortimer J. Adler

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317830771
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

First published in 2000. This is Volume I of eight in the International Library of Philosophy looking at the area pf philosophy of Mind an Language. Written in 1927, Dialectic is a convenient technical name for the kind of thinking which takes place when human beings enter into dispute, or when they carry on in reflection the polemical consideration of some theory or idea. This text is an attempt to examine the circumstances and conditions of controversy in order to understand what are its inescapable limitations, its intellectual traits and values.

Dialectic

I
The Discovery of Dialectic

INTRODUCTORY

THE characteristic activity of God, according to Aristotle, is a thinking on thinking. Since God, in this view, is the perfect philosopher, it is not wholly inappropriate that among men the philosophers should most frequently have become engaged in this activity. But being men as well as somewhat divine, they have not ever been wholly successful. This may be seen in that fact that preoccupation with the considerations of methodology has occurred at every stage in the history of western European thought. The specific problems, and the terms in which they may have been temporarily solved, have changed, of course, from time to time. But in each epoch there has been some attempt to state the ideal of human thinking, and to describe the process best adapted to achieve that end.

By and large, the methodology of a period, either explicitly stated as a logic or a psychology, or perhaps merely exemplified in its intellectual products, is a sensitive index of the typical intellectuality of the period. This if said very generally of the classic, mediaeval, and modern periods, would hardly be questionable. It is relevant to our purpose to make this statement only in so far as this book claims to be a departure from the traditional conceptions of thinking prevalent in this, and perhaps, other epochs. And to make this claim significant it is necessary to define the novelty of the present attempt, as well as to indicate its sources in the tradition. It may be demonstrable that we are here engaged in focalizing and crystallizing a number of tendencies that have always existed, have at times been prominent, and have recently come into new emphasis.

The traditional literature of methodology—and no distinction is here made between normative logic and the various psychological accounts of thinking—may be summarized in the statement of the few fundamental theses which have recurred repeatedly and have, therefore, acquired a certain obviousness and conventionality, (1) Thinking is a matter of having and dealing with ideas. (2) Thinking is a process which an individual mind carries on by itself when it has ideas and deals with them. (3) Thinking is an activity of reason, and is essentially independent of irrational purpose and desire. (4) Thinking seeks to end in knowing; that is, thinking rests in the truth.

These theses form a highly conventional doctrine, but a doctrine which has nevertheless been denied unanimity of assent by the assertion at one time or another of contrary opinions regarding them. In examining each of these statements more carefully this will be kept in mind, and the divergent opinions will be stated in each case. These divergent tendencies have suggested, and perhaps even partially formulated, the doctrine of this book.

(1) Thinking is a matter of having and dealing with ideas. Ideas may be defined either as images in the mind, or as propositions, or as judgments, or even as imageless thoughts. There is a sense, perhaps, in which an idea either is, or has something to do with, one or another of these entities. And thinking certainly does not go on independently of ideas in one or another of these senses. Common logic and the traditional psychology have not committed an egregious error in making this assertion. The difficulty rests with what has been omitted, and in some cases, excluded from the description of thinking. It is only recently that the insufficiency of this description has been suggested by two unrelated tendencies in contemporary thought, behaviorism, on the one hand, and a renewed interest in linguistics, on the other.

No espousal of behaviorism is herein intended. That is not necessarily implied in the reference to the behavioristic psychologist's insistence upon the relation of thinking and talking. Even the dilemma, whether thinking can go on apart from language, or whether thinking is to be identified with language activity, need not concern us at present. Our interest is chiefly in the assertion of the importance of language as an agency in thinking. This assertion does not deny the thesis being considered. It merely suggests another aspect of the process of having and dealing with ideas, which earlier definitions of the idea as an image or a judgment or a notion, omitted. It would make the thesis read as follows: thinking is a matter of having and dealing with ideas, (largely or entirely) through the medium of language.

Behaviorism arose at a time when psychologists and logicians interested in the problem of thinking were concerned with the theory of meaning. But behaviorism, although it had special theory of thought, contributed little to the more abstruse, and perhaps too philosophical, consideration of the nature of meaning. Curiously enough, however, what seems to be the upshot of a prolonged discussion of meaning, is quite congenial to behaviorism. The pure and mathematical logicians were interested in meaning only in the sense of implication; the introspective and, perhaps, pure psychologists were interested in meaning only as the attribute of an image or as a conscious entity or gegenstand itself. It remained for those who approached the problem as the central theme of linguistics to give the most adequate and detailed statement of all the issues involved.¹ Again it must be clearly understood that no one definition or theory of meaning is herein accepted. The important point is rather that by investigating meaning in terms of language, in terms of the functioning of symbols in whatever notation, a thorough phenomenology of the processes by which words, or other symbols, come to have the various meanings that they do have, was obtained. This phenomenology may have solved no problems, but it at least clarified them by enumerating the many meanings of the word "meaning" itself.

Thinking as a matter of ideas thus becomes not only generally an affair of language, in terms of behaviorism, but more specifically, an affair of meanings which can be expressed clearly, if not ultimately, in terms of verbal relationships and the characteristics of the symbolic process. That thinking is such and such is not to be asserted; it is our purpose merely to observe the modifications of the original thesis introduced by behavioristic psychology and the linguistic theory of meaning, two tendencies divergent from the main tradition.

It is interesting and important to remember that the theory of language is a radical and perhaps subversive element only in the specifically modern tradition from Descartes and Locke to the present. It was otherwise in both classical and mediaeval times. Without scholarly documentation this statement can be supported by calling attention to the intimate relation between grammar and logic in Aristotle's Organon, and to the order of studies in the mediaeval trivium, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. It is hardly implied that there is a concord between these two instances of a relation observed between the structure of language and the procedure of thought, and the contemporary observation of a similar relationship. As a matter of fact, mediaeval literature furnishes us with several disagreeing doctrines of language, and in Aristotle the relations between grammar and logic are to be found by the inquirer who has an eye for such matters. They are not explicitly expounded by Aristotle himself. But, at least, these references lead us to the conclusion that it has only been since the seventeenth century that the description and theory of thinking have ignored or under-estimated the relevancy and significance of language, of grammar, and of rhetoric. It is, therefore, against the background of the last three centuries that the revived interest in and emphasis of language is important.

(2) Thinking is a process which an individual mind carries on by itself when it has ideas and deals with them. The emphasis in this statement is upon the fact of individuality. According to the conventional opinion here being expounded, thinking may take any form whatsoever; i.e. reverie, ratiocination, pragmatic reflection, experimental procedure, or thinking may be either by analogy, induction or deduction,—but it will always be described as a process in which a single mind engages. It is difficult to unravel the historical grounds for the commonplaceness which this thesis has attained, but it is not unlikely that this emphasis upon the individual in thinking has been connected historically with the equally conventional opinion that all thinking can be exhaustively described in terms of deduction and induction or some form thereof.

The objection which might be raised to this thesis, and the historical divergences from it which lead to this objection, assails both of its two clauses at the same time. Thinking may be a process carried on by two minds and depending for its life upon the interplay of these two minds; and if thinking is ever so conditioned, it may have a formal structure which is not really reducible to the canonical forms of induction or deduction.

Anyone who meditates for a moment upon the experience of human conversation,—conversation intended to establish or dispose of opinions and perhaps, therefore, called argumentative or polemical,—will agree that such conversation is a kind of thinking in which an individual mind can indulge only through the mutual participation of one or more other minds. And if it is not denied that conversation or argument is a kind of thinking, it will be admitted that here is a kind of thinking which differs from the patterns of the laboratory and the library, and which could not be properly analysed or described by reference to ordinary logical terms.

The fact of human conversation and argument is so omnipresent among persons who might be concerned in the least about the nature of thought, that it seems odd the tradition should have ignored this very relevant phenomenon. As a matter of fact, it is again the specifically modern tradition since the Renaissance which has been content with its common formulae of induction and deduction. There are major exceptions in both classical and mediaeval thought.

The dialogues of Plato, whatever be the final satisfactory interpretation of them, exemplify perfectly the cogitative qualities of human discourse. That Plato employed the dialogue as a literary form may be due to the influence upon the poetic tendencies in his nature of the mimes of Sophron; but there is also considerable ground for feeling that Plato wrote dialogues because he appreciated the origins of thought in conversation. That Plato should have had this insight is not startling when one remembers that his intellectual career was begun and nourished among the sophists. And, furthermore, Plato is responsible for the term "dialectic", a term which most generally designates the processes of discursive (or conversational) thinking.

The contrast and opposition of the classical and modern traditions with regard to this point is made sharply clear by an inuendo of verbal usage. Plato would not have resented the identification of sophistry and dialectic, if we were allowed to distinguish between good and bad sophistry, between the sophistry of Socrates and Thrasymachus—although we might smile at the distinction. At least, he would have perceived their formal similarity. But in the last three centuries sophistry has become a word of opprobrium and derogation par excellence, and without any recognition of formal structure, it has been employed as a synonym for dialectic and for "scholasticism"—another item which the modern tradition has thrown into the discard or held up to ridicule and abuse.

That scholasticism be so designated and so classified is not at all inappropriate, for the schoolmen were masters of the art which the dialogues of Plato both exemplified and praised, and which they conventionally called dialectic. We cannot here enter upon an adequate report of the nature of dialectic and the role it played in mediaeval thought; but we can observe certain of its intellectual affiliations that will define it against the background of the tradition.

Dialectic was understood to be neither a method of investigation nor one of demonstration. It was a method of argument, of controversy, and disputation. Probably in so far as argument occupied so large a part of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, dialectic was valued; and probably in so far as investigation, experiment, and demonstration have been the dominant intellectual concerns of the era introduced by Galileo and Newton, dialectic has been ignored, its value under-estimated or condemned, its form misunderstood. This fact of change of interest and occupation, along with a certain interpretation of the Organon of Aristotle made popular by the Novum Organum of Bacon, probably accounts for the conception that thinking is a matter of induction and deduction, a business of inference generally, if not exclusively, carried on by the single mind.

The importance of dialectic as an educational device is also significant. One remembers that in The Republic the training of the philosopher-king was to be concluded with dialectic, "the coping-stone that lies on top of all the sciences"; that in the education of the Roman gentleman, as reflected and outlined in the writings of Cicero, rhetoric was one of the foundations; and that in the organization of the mediaeval school, the trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. What was at one time considered indispensable in the training of either a gentleman or a philosopher has now become an element quite carefully to be excluded from the curriculum, as subversive of the scientific discipline. Instead logic, inductive and deductive, became the required course of study, and it is worth noting that it has completely failed to achieve the importance in the modern scheme that dialectic occupied in the ancient and mediaeval. It has passed from being a discipline thought necessary in the training of the scientific mind to being either an accessory to such training, or merely a consideration of the discipline itself in the abstract, a set of formal rules and practices On the contrary, dialectic retained its vitality, and flourished in the soil in which it was indigenous. Certainly in Montaigne, and even so late as Dr. Johnson, rhetoric and the ability to converse well were recognized as the distinguishing adjuncts of the educated man.

The reiterated relation of dialectic to rhetoric and to grammar suggests that our earlier discussion of the part that language plays in thinking again becomes relevant On the one hand, the importance of language is conceded both in the classical and mediaeval interest in dialectic. The dialogues of Plato seem to be in part concerned with the definition of terms, and with making distinctions clear in words. The schoolman was made fit to study and practise dialectic by the preliminary discipline of grammar and rhetoric. On the other hand, the very recent study of language contributes from a totally different angle another confirmation of the significant and intimate interdependence, not only of language and thought in general, but specifically, of language and the kind of thinking which we have called conversational or dialectical.

This contribution is made jointly by anthropology and psychology. The latter's study of the origin of language habits in the child¹ leads to the theory that after the period of verbal egocentrism, the basic value in word-acquisition is the use of language to communicate. It is only after the child has acquired a vocabulary in order to communicate its wishes or its feelings to its social environment that it is able to, or tends to, use this vocabulary for the purposes of a-social, or intelligent but non-communicative, expression. In other words, talking to oneself is a much later, and perhaps higher, development than talking to others. The kind of thinking which goes on in what is technically called sub-vocal talking is derivative from the earlier vocalized speech of direct communication.

The anthropologist reports a similar finding in the linguistic habits of primitive peoples. Their language forms are primarily adapted to the needs of communication, of asking and answering questions, of giving orders or making statements having social import, rather than to the purposes of recording observations or distinctions in discourse. We have become so accustomed to regarding language as a device extraordinarily well adapted for registering the observations and distinctions we are capable of making, we do not realize that among less developed peoples, less "sophisticated " perhaps, language serves the much simpler function of direct communication.

Socialized thinking may be, if these evidences are worthy, more primitive than thinking which is done apart from the social environment and is at the same time intelligent rather than autistic. Thinking, if it is related to language at all, may be primitively a matter of talking in the sense of social speech, a matter of conversing. Dialectic, or the refinement of conversation, is certainly a later development, a sophistication of speech as it were; and similarly, the use of language in intellectual processes which are not social or conversational, is a derivative practice. In the light of these distinctions, it is odd that the thesis we are considering, i.e. thinking is a process which the individual mind carries on by itself, should have ever gained such conventional weight, and that methodology of the modern tradition should have been so exclusively concerned with induction and deduction and similar ways of inference, to the complete ignorance of dialectical thinking.

One prominent exception to the modern tradition must be acknowledged. Hegel, among the philosophers, not only recognized but emphasized the distinction between the ordinary normative logic and the method of dialectic, so much so, in fact, that the phrase "Hegelian dialectic" has become a catch-word of disapproval or praise. Hegel generalized the method beyond the confines of human discourse and beyond its employment in controversy and dispute, thus going beyond Plato or Abelard. It becomes with Hegel the underlying pattern of all intellectual activity, and, of course, of all change in the universe, since whatever is real is rational. At this point we cannot pause to evaluate the Hegelian position, or even to contrast it thoroughly with the historically earlier uses of dialectic. It contributes to our present discussion in one respect: it suggests that dialectic is a form which can be analysed and contemplated apart from its occurence in actual discourse or dispute. To put this in other words, dialectic is a kind of thinking to be distinguished from the inductive or deductive thinking engaged in by the "single mind", and what seems to be implied thereby is that dialectic involves a duality of minds. It does actually in ordinary conversation and dispute; but what Hegel leads us to see is that t...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• PREFACE
• Contents
• PART I. DISCOVERY
• PART II. DESCRIPTION
• PART III. INTERPRETATION
• APPENDICES
• INDEX OF PERSONS AND TITLES
• INDEX TO THE ARGUMENT