Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p.

A Path to Dialectical Logic

Harry Henderson

(presented at 2021 ISPDI Virtual Conference “Soul’s Logical Life.”)

[Slides: one for each title after Preface, with others as noted below.]

Preface

As I worked on this, what actually developed wasn’t exactly “an introduction to dialectical logic” --but it
was too late to change the title. While I’ll be touching upon some of the key concepts in our work, what
I’ve ended up with is more of “a pathway for understanding how this kind of thinking developed and
what it implies.” My hope is that by understanding more of how dialectic developed and was further
extended, we’ll be more aware of what is distinctive about it and some of its implications.

A Ladder from Heaven

When we speak of logic in the ordinary sense, what kinds of assumptions do we make? When we apply a
form of logic, what is our stance toward whatever phenomenon or fact we are considering?

To simplify (as we must throughout) there are two familiar kinds of logic. First is the formal logic
of the syllogism. If we know all persons are mortal, and Socrates was a person, then we know Socrates
was mortal—and sure enough, I haven’t seen him in the marketplace lately. This kind of logic is “top
down”: it proceeds from known truths, specifies relationships, and if that is done correctly, yields true
conclusions. But note that this kind of logic, which is called “analytic” doesn’t create truths, it only
reveals them.

Each structure of consciousness has its characteristic form of logic. Analytic logic is a natural fit
to the age of classical metaphysics. It deals with entities whose qualities and relationships are fixed.
Once let down rung by rung from the self-caused starting point (God) everything in the earthly realm
can be slotted into place. (This is the inverse of Jacob’s ladder. Rather than going from earth to heaven,
it reaches toward earth but never quite touches it.)
Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 2

The Truth Machine

However, the very fact that Aquinas, the Scholastics, the great Islamic philosophers felt a need to
elaborate this structure of deductions to shore up faith indicates a stress in the building, a shifting
ground in the consciousness on which it rested. Externally, historians can attribute this to social and
economic factors, but internally (dialectically) Giegerich has pointed to the working out of the logic of
incarnation in Christianity itself. From the upward (heaven-looking) perspective consciousness found
itself refracted to the lateral (sideways, positivistic) view.

Natural science, which came to the fore in the last several centuries, seeks to find and verify
new truths. This involves the other kind of prevailing logic, the empirical, inductive, or “bottom up” kind.
This method involves the iterative acquiring and verifying of observations of nature or results of
experiments, testing hypotheses against them. Unlike analytic logic this “synthetic” logic does not yield
absolute truths, but approximate ones, probabilities, or increasingly effective ways of predicting what
will happen under various conditions.

The mid-20th century saw the development of the electronic digital computer. This fuses
together the two forms of logic—formal and inductive. What started as the “logical algebra” of George
Boole in the 19th century became the basis for designing the ‘logic circuits” of the computer. But today’s
software widely uses Bayes’ theorem (based on the work of an 18 th century mathematician), which
implements induction to create powerful statistical tools. It replaces relation with correlation.

Logos

[Slide 3]

In order to see how dialectical logic is different from either of these reigning forms of logic, we need to
say what the latter have in common. Both analytic and synthetic logic are “exteriorizing.” That is, they
subject a given phenomenon either to the truths derived from its relationship to other phenomena, or
to the results of relevant observations. Both forms of logic are mechanical or algorithmic in that if you
apply the method to a phenomenon successfully, you get either a truth (formal) or incremental degree
of certainty (induction). Finally, neither form of logic necessarily involves subjectivity or conscious
experience, which is why computers can do it.

Now to get at what dialectical logic does, we must begin with the word “logic” itself. The word
derives of course from “logos” which is often translated as “word” but can also mean “conversation” or
“discourse.” A dialectic (the word goes back at least to Plato) is at root a “conversation” in which ideas
are the ultimate interlocutors.
Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 3

We’ve seen deductive (absolute but abstract) and inductive (relative but more specific) truths,
but what kind of truth could a dialectic (conversation) yield? And where would it come from? For now,
let’s say it’s more like the truth we believe we have experienced as we walk from the theater after a
really good performance of Hamlet than the truths we find from Galileo or Newton. We found the small
world of the stage to have been, for an hour or two, a world paradoxically bounded and infinite, needing
or wanting nothing “outside.” Whatever this truth might be, it is a true about being, in a particular
moment.

History has a History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) lived on the cusp of an age of revolution—in America and
France, and eventually spreading throughout Europe. The industrial revolution that began in Great
Britain was also literally gathering steam.

The question for philosophy was how to account for the power of ideas that seemed to be
driving profound social change, and how ideas like human rights, the heroic individual or the nation-
state emerged and underwent continual transformation. Analytic logic could classify ideas or derive
them from fundamental categories (Kant). There were even attempts (notably Leibniz) to create a kind
of “conceptual calculus” that could manipulate ideas somewhat like the way calculus can measure the
incommensurable and quantify the infinitesimal. But Hegel believed that ideas had a kind of life, a kind
of agency that could account for their development. And for Hegel, every idea comes with a history (or
biography, if you will). But also, history is itself an idea, and “Philosophy is its own time apprehended in
thoughts.” Hegel believed that philosophy is a dialectic with history as expressed in how thought works
on itself.

Devotion to the Phenomenon

Hegel took the idea of dialectic (already being developed by Kant and others in early modernity) and in a
kind of Copernican revolution shifted the focus from ideas as something we as subjects think about to
thoughts that “think themselves,” that have a life of their own: “logical life.”

Another way to put this is to say that for Hegel (and for Giegerich) ideas are “first class
phenomena.” They are not just “about” something, or labels or frames or markers for understanding
“real” experience.” In PDI, when we are committed to work with a phenomenon such as a dream, a
myth, or a cultural event, our material (the “prima materia” as the alchemists said) is the phenomenon,
that which “shows itself” or “shines forth.”
Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 4

The physicist Richard Feynman once recalled how his father explained to him, as they watched a
bird, that while the bird had a name (and indeed many names in many languages), what was important
was not the name of the bird but “what the bird is doing.”

One way to see the implication of this devotion to the phenomenon is by analogy to biology.
The early “natural philosophers” from Aristotle to Linnaeus observed and classified plants and animals
and showed their taxonomic relationships. This was an expression of top-down, analytic logic.

But modern biologists see things not only from the viewpoint of the individual but of the
species, the ecosystem, and the flow of information (genomics). A rabbit is not just a rabbit, it’s a
moment in the life of a species, a gene, and indeed a world.

The equivalent for “logical life” is seeing a phenomenon as the expression or manifestation or
“moment” in the life of an idea (notion). In more complex phenomena such as myths, there are often
several moments (for example, Artemis and Actaeon in The Soul’s Logical Life).

Life and the Dance of Soul

A generation or so after Hegel comes Darwin. If we substitute “life” for “thought” we have a similar idea.
Without the idea that life itself has history and that life works on itself, we could not come up with the
idea of evolution—an idea that was already “in the air” of a changing consciousness waiting only for the
discovery of a plausible mechanism (natural selection).

Karen Ng writes that "there is a central, recurring rhetorical device that Hegel returns to
again and again throughout his philosophical system: that of describing the activity of reason and
thought in terms of the dynamic activity and development of organic life."
Ng, Karen (Karen K.) (2 January 2020). Hegel's concept of life : self-consciousness, freedom, logic. New York, NY.
p. 3

Giegerich links logical life to biological life by saying that

... the soul is, as it were, a dance to the power of two: the dance not upon the lifeless, but on biological
life, which itself ... is a dance, the dance upon the lifeless.

(Giegerich, WIS, 29-30)

Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 5

The word “soul” as used by Giegerich deserves a whole set of lectures and books to itself, and
Giegerich of course gave us What is Soul? For here and now, though, we can say “soul” is to the life of
the mind (nous) what life processes are to matter. Not another, added thing but “what it exists as.”
Exists as performance. We could say soul is the performance of logical life. It is a quicksilver word that is
deliberately underdetermined, not rigidly defined, but brings itself to life in our consciousness if we
allow it to grasp itself through us.

Approaching Dialectic

Now let’s turn to the structure of dialectic. What is known as Hegelian dialectic is often
misunderstood as a kind of “negotiation” between two opposing ideas (thesis and antithesis) that
somehow results in a “synthesis” that is something like a compromise between or amalgamation of
the two. But that would be chemistry—separate elements combining or reconfiguring themselves.
Here, as Jung and Giegerich suggested, alchemy is the better metaphor.

It begins with the phenomenon to be engaged—that which shines forth or manifests. It is “in
the vas”--the container, or better, it is its own container or horizon. Quoting Jung, we are cautioned
"Above all, don't let anything from outside, anything that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy
image has 'everything it needs."
Jung, CW 14 at 749.
(For “fantasy image” we can substitute any phenomenon that we are entertaining.)

But what does “outside” mean? Anything that would assess the phenomenon through its
relationship to something outside, such as a theory, or another phenomenon, or even the
psychologists’ own personal response to it.

Giegerich explains that that the method we’ve called PDI:

"... views phenomena from within. Owing to the absolute-negative inwardization of the phenomenon
into itself, there is no outer reality any more that could provide the context for the discussion of the
phenomenon. The latter, being construed as having everything within itself, even its own context, has
become a world in itself. It provides its own horizon from which it is to be apperceived.

(Giegerich CEP v. 2, p. 15)

Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 6

Moments

The initial encounter with the material brings with it what could be called its first immediacy. “This is
how the world is.” But then comes the negation “… and yet it is not!” (Actually the “not” was always
there—but consciousness requires sequence, narrative.) Logical life, like biological life, is “restless”--
the “not” itself then proves inadequate. What is emerging is more than “something” that can be or not
be … but something that is “becoming” through successive determinations. This is the second or
absolute negation.

The result is what Hegel (and Giegerich) refer to as “sublation.” It is a complex differentiation
that overcomes the original, naive thought and yet fulfills its implications. (Indeed, it is something like
Jung’s idea of “individuation” except the subject is not a person but a thought).

An analogy from biological life would be an insect that genetically “has everything it needs” to
fulfill its functions, thanks to its genes. However the first immediacy, the caterpillar, must be
“negated” --”deconstructed” in order that the idea “butterfly” can be ultimately instantiated. Another
analogy, from our personal experience, is the shattering of the first immediacy of childhood by the
“negation” of adolescence (a time when we may have thought that everything we had been taught
was wrong, or not to be trusted) but then the emergence of the adult brings a complex, sophisticated
consciousness that (hopefully) can negotiate the inherent ambiguity of life.
[Slide 9]

On a more conceptual level, for a simple example consider this sequence:

There is a God
There is no God
There is “no no God.”

Now if this were math, you would end up where you started, since two negatives make a
positive. But in dialectical logic, the quality of the thought as a whole is transformed in each move.
“No God” or atheism is still essentially the same syntax in which God exists—it is a simple negation,
as though a picture has been removed from the frame, but the frame still occupies its prominent
position on the wall. But the absolute negation (“no no God”) is a transformation of the very syntax.
No longer a question of a being or non-being but something that is (always) becoming—
consciousness itself?
Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 7

This process in principle does not end any more than the evolution of life ends. Hegel himself
uses what we would recognize as the “uroboros” in describing it:
...the science presents itself as a circle that winds around itself, where the mediation winds the end
back to the beginning which is the simple ground; the circle is thus a circle of circles, for each single
member ensouled by the method is reflected into itself so that, in returning to the beginning it is at
the same time the beginning of a new member.
[Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. (2010). The science of logic. Di Giovanni, George, 1935–. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. p. 751.

[Slide 10]

The Further Path

Giegerich has said he’s not a “Hegelian.” Hegel is the “baseline” for where dialectical logic stands today,
but Hegel worked two centuries ago. Like everything else in the human world, thought and
consciousness has developed further.

As a philosopher, Hegel worked within the millennia long tradition of philosophy, and the
phenomena he used as examples for his logic were generally concepts such as being, nonbeing,
becoming or quality, quantity, and infinity. He was also concerned with the movement of Geist (spirit) as
it unfolds in history, but again, seen through a rather large scale, abstract events such as the French
Revolution. Perhaps we can say that in Hegel the dialectic tried to move from the abstract or universal
to the realization in the concrete as a “concrete abstraction”--but still something more was needed to
turn this into a method and practice.

The philosopher “thinking about” logical life is still in the syntax of observer – observed, still
outside looking in. Following Descartes, the “I” thinks as subject about an object (the phenomenon). But
implicit in dialectics is a subject that is also its own object, its own “other.” The thought that thinks itself.
In order to participate in that, however, the structure of consciousness itself has to change from a
Cartesian dualism to a uroboric self-relation.

For Giegerich, the “I” is itself a phenomenon, and thus has a history, and is characteristic of
modernity. But as we have seen, the dialectical process is unending, and continues to work on the idea
of subjectivity and the phenomenon of “consciousness at large”, which is being shown in “post
modernity” to be no longer coterminous with the “I.”
Path to Dialectical Logic (Henderson) p. 8

In the 20th century phenomenology (notably Husserl) raised consciousness to the status of an
immediate or “first class” phenomenon. According to Wikipedia:

Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic

reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in
acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from
the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and
objects acting and reacting upon one another.

While phenomenologists like Husserl did not employ Hegel’s dialectics, they did “bracket” or
defer or set aside anything “outside” the phenomenon in an attempt to allow it express in its own way
what it is “about.”

But more directly important for us here is what happened in psychology. Around the turn of the
th
20 century, the development of psychology, particularly depth psychology, also had to work directly
with consciousness and the “presenting symptoms.” Here, one soon learns that the “I” is not, cannot be,
the whole of consciousness. There is “something else” that, like the dark matter in physics, structures
our world and provides its horizon often without our being aware of it. Freud called it the “unconscious”
and posited various entities that operated in it. Jung, while retaining the term “unconscious” saw it as
“autonomous psyche” and later said that the greater part of “the soul” was outside the body (the
individual). However, Jung was unable to take that final step from “an individual who has a psychology”
to “psychology” as its own subject-object, to consciousness at large. What is “unconscious” is not a
realm of contents but the structure of consciousness itself, the sea in which the fish swims.

Giegerich has rejected the notion of “the unconscious” for I believe two reasons. First, it reifies
(makes into a thing) what is in fact a quality, that of being outside our (ego) awareness. Second, it
preserves an egocentric syntax: ego and non-ego. But “ego” or I is itself a phenomenon, indeed a
historical phenomenon. In order to study that phenomenon, we would need to operate from a
subjectivity that is not that of the ego but within the dialectic itself. Giegerich call this the “psychological
I” and the distinction between the ego viewpoint and this soul-subjectivity “the psychological
difference.”

The result of this shift is to make “psychology” the discourse of soul about itself, the subject
being “consciousness at large” as refracted through specific phenomena. The attention to the
phenomenon and the flow of logical life, the movement from “logic” to “logos” and the sublation of
philosophy as psychology is the achievement of this work.