What Is Dialectics?

You might have heard about Hegel’s dialectics. You might have also heard about Marx’s dialectical materialism, which was Marx’s response, or reaction, to Hegel’s proposition. Both Hegel and Marx were highly influential nineteenth-century thinkers; we can, thus, conclude that the nineteenth century and the dialectical method have a significant connection. This doesn’t mean, however, that dialectics is a concept born in the nineteenth century: the history of the concept goes back to ancient Greece and Plato. Defining dialectics, therefore, is not all that easy. Without going into the specifics just yet, we can come up with a fair, relatively simple, and helpful definition.

Imagine that everything in this world has a double. Not a double like a doppelgänger, such as William Wilson in Poe’s homonymous story, or Borges himself in “El otro” (“The Other”), but double in a sense that every unity contains within itself two conflicting forces. For instance, every human being (a unity) consists of a material body and a non-material, abstract soul; or, in Freud’s theory, every mind (a unity) is comprised of consciousness and the unconscious. For a unity to exist, in brief, these opposing forces – body/soul; consciousness/the unconscious – must function in conjunction. If you separate them, the unity falls apart. What we call the dialectical method, then, can be roughly described as an analytical mode that reflects on and unveils the nature and the role of the element placed on the other side of the unity’s spectrum – like soul in relation to body, the unconscious in relation to consciousness, or the non-Western aspects of Brazilian culture in relation to the Western ones.

In Chapter Three, I argued that “Brazilian culture is deeply rooted in a complex dialectics of conflicting forces between Western and non-Western (i.e. African and Indigenous) values.” Therefore, what upholds Brazil as a unity is this permanent clash of vectors that pushes Brazilian culture in distinct and, at times, opposing directions; this clash can be summarized, parodically speaking, through the dilemma: “To be or not to be Western?” That is to say, under the appearance of “Westerness,” there is a set of fundamentally non-European practices and ideas which shape Brazilian culture while also constantly defying Brazil’s Western heritage. In this respect, or in this “Westerness dialectics,” the non-Western values represent the dialectical other of Brazilian culture.