Dialectic

A stab at a legit ELI5: ‘Hegel’s “dialectic” is a way of describing what it means to think about or do anything at all. It can be hard to understand, because its such a big idea. Sometimes its good to tackle big ideas like that with an example. Here’s how it works. Let’s imagine you have a friend. You want to be the best friend you can. You are totally, 10,000% into being their friend. So you do all the stuff you think a friend should do. You say hi to them whenever you see them, you give them big hugs, you give them presents, you tell them how nice they are. And you do this all the time. You even hog your friend, and don’t want them to play with other people! You pour yourself into it, completely [Entäußerrung] Eventually your friend doesn’t want to be around you because they feel like you don’t give them any room to be themselves. You tried hard to be the best friend you could be, but you ended up being the opposite of a good friend. You did the best you could, and you ended up with the opposite of what you wanted. What would you do? Would you decide to start picking on your friend and calling them names? No that would be silly. You wouldn’t say “everything I ever thought about being a good friend was TOTALLY wrong.” You would see that what you were doing was partially right. But it was just one little piece of the “Big Picture” of what being a good friend is all about—which includes lots of other stuff like respecting your friend’s space, and letting them be themselves. So now, you have a bigger, better understanding of what it means to be a good friend. [Aufhebung] Hegel thinks everything we can do and everything we can think is like this. There’s no getting around it. And it can be painful! [Verzweiflung, Zerissenheit, Opfer] But that is how we learn who and what wr are and can be—in fact it is how people have always learned, all throughout history (even when they didn’t quite realize it!) [The cunning of reason]’ [Edit: a couple words]

As I understand it, the dialectic for Hegel isn't necessarily an argumentative tool, or even the same as the method of reasoning of the same name, in the way it was used by Greeks like Socrates. I think the best examples of the dialectic come from Hegel's Science of Logic, where he uses this method in an attempt to, from what I recall, develop a system of Logic (in a kind of metaphysical way, a logic that says things about being) that uses no presuppositions - not even things like the principle of identity that we normally apply in formal logic (i.e. something cannot be A and not-A at the same time). Essentially, I think, Hegel ends up with a kind of system in which positing something, like Being, always ends up also positing its negation, in this case Nothingness, and there is a sort of moment - and here my understanding is fuzzy and could do with elaboration, I'm still learning here - where the original position and its negation are sublated into a new position which both entails and exceeds the prior two.