To have a good understanding we should also look at the previous stages. Each stage brings the past stages with it. The plant produces the bud, and the bud blooms into a flower, which produces the seed. We can look at this example with the starting point of the seed. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other and constitutes thereby the life of the whole. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. This maybe made easier to understand by using the example of a flower bud. Hegel uses this idea of movement from one end to the other for reasoning. It goes through transformation continuously. Hegel’s view is that the world is in a movement from one phase to the next. Hegel’s view of dialectics has a background based in history. Generally, when we speak about contradictions, we either view it as an absurdity that negates any further thought or as a pro-con discussion which leads to choosing one over the other. Hegel’s idea of dialectical process is a holistic approach. The new understanding can be notated as A’, which again is partial and sets off another dialectical process. As we further our understanding of the concept, we go through a dialectic process by looking at the innate contradiction (A and !A). The idea of dialectics implies that all abstract concepts are partial and contain innate contradictions. This is a very simple view of Hegel’s dialectic. To improve our understanding of “A”, we should also look at “!A”. Our understanding of “A” lies somewhere between “A” and “!A”. This understanding automatically brings in the opposite or “notA” to the realm of the understanding. When we look at a phenomenon say “A”, we are speaking about our understanding of “A”. With this introduction, I should note here that my post is “inspired” by his dialectical approach.

Hegel’s writing is quite dense and he is often considered to be one of the hardest philosophers to understand. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) was a German philosopher who furthered the ideas of German Idealism in Philosophy after Immanuel Kant. In today’s post, I am looking at Hegel’s dialectical approach and using it to gain a better understanding of the purpose of an organization.

The hegelian dialectic