2025-06-08 NSSUN - Pierre Grimes - Dialectic as a philosophical method - Âm thanh Lưu trữ Miễn phí

Sunday's Study - Pierre's Dissertation on Dialectic.

We finished Pierre's "Dissertation on the Dialectic as a Philosophical Method". We read Section III on "The Proposition and Negative Dialectic" from p. 224 to 238.

This section takes up the Negative Dialectic. "The transition from the positive to the negative dialectic is a shift from the acceptance of the relational to its denial."

So Pierre lays out what the mechanism of the denial is. It involves an analysis of the use of language, i.e. the analysis of the use of the relational propositions compared with the negative dialectic.

Any statement requires subject, verb, adjective. To have meaning these three must have a context, a set of relations that brings understanding. Without the unity of the proposition, there is no meaning. Such language is regarded as metaphoric. Fundamentally it rests on difference. Difference is necessary for relations, such as those between the phenomenal and noumenal, dvaita and advaita, appearance and reality, jiva and Brahman, etc. The concept of difference for the Negative Dialectic school cannot be "rationally defended". It rests upon a spurious, hence unreal distinction. Any positive statement of the nature of reality is irrational and false.

At the end we did a search for "inner dialectic" to see the meaning more clearly.

That is one characteristic of Pierre's dissertation: you can search the fundamental terms to find them used throughout the text in the same way. So if you lose your way through insufficient study you can review through the search function.