Hegelian dialectic: Nonlinear Function
Created:
Modified:

Hegelian dialectic

This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.

Sometimes caricatured as 'thesis', 'antithesis', 'synthesis', but Hegel didn't use those words! His three stages were:

  1. Abstract
  2. Negative
  3. Concrete

Any abstraction can be challenged, because all models are wrong. There is always something left out, something not captured by the abstraction; this is the 'negative'. With examination and experience we see the flaws in the abstraction and develop it into something concrete and useful.

Meta