The Hegelian Dialect is often considered somewhat of a difficult idea. Essentially, Hegel believed that the structure reality unfolded through contradictions and opposites that work together to produce a new outcome. At the time when Hegel wrote, this was considered a highly innovative and new idea.

This idea came about as a response to an Idea that Immanuel Kant had about the way humans perceive reality. Kant argued that there were certain categories of perception such as causality, totality, and reality. What he meant by this is that there are certain ways of perceiving reality that the human brain uses, ways that humans are born with. Essentially these categories serve as lenses through which humans see the world around them.

This opened Kant up to much criticism, however. Many took issue with his argument that humans can be born with any a priori way to view reality. Specifically the sceptics of the Humean tradition argued that it would be impossible to know if these so called lenses on reality didn’t come from experience.

This is where Hegel comes in. Hegel took Kant’s argument to the next level such that it wouldn’t be prone to sceptic and empiricist attacks; he argued that these so called categories of Kant were actually the way that reality fundamentally unfolds. To him, they are the universe. And harkening back to the dialect, he believed that there was a sort of interaction between two opposing qualities that lead to the development of a sort of universal way.

While studying this all, I immediately saw the connection between this and the eastern idea of Tao. For eastern sages like Lao Tzu, Tao is the eternal way or universal unfolding of reality. Similar to how for Hegel the universe unfolds through the interaction of opposites, in Tao the universe unfolds through the balance of two opposing forces: Yin and Yang. The interaction between Yin and Yang defines the development of reality.

At this point there comes to light a clear difference between Tao and the Hegelian Dialect. The Hegelian Dialect views history and the universe as a process by which humanity is brought closer and closer to enlightenment and progress. Each stage in the universal unfolding is temporary, and will eventually lead to a new stage. Tao is more static. It is more about balance. There are no temporary stages that will lead to infinitely many new stages. This focus on balance is likely a product of the times that this idea became popular in. Lao Tzu propagated this idea of Tao during the Chinese feudal era, in which warring states were constantly looting, pillaging, killing, and wreaking havoc on China. There had been a traditional set of rules and conduct known as li, and it had been abandoned as each feudal state sought to do more harm to the other feudal states. Lao Tzu probably felt that balance was needed in order to restore peace, hence his focus on balance

Lao Tzu also promoted inaction, also known as Wu Wei. This is not to say that people should literally stop doing things; it only means that one should go with the flow of life, of Tao, instead of pursuing some rogue action. Again, this idea seems to be a product of the times. However, this also presents another key difference between the dialect and Tao. Philosophers who have used the hegelian idea of the Dialect have promoted deliberate action to progress from one opposing state of being to the next opposing state of being, essentially saying that humans must force this universal unfolding.

One such philosopher is the famous-or infamous-Karl Marx. He took Hegel’s Dialect and viewed it in purely economic terms. He believed that history is defined by the economic conditions; that the universal unfolding of reality is purely dependent on the economic state of people. He saw several distinct stages in history, each defined by their economic realities. Stage one is a sort of primitive tribalism and to him the last stage is communism. He advocated for a forced revolution from capitalism to communism. Lao Tzu would most certainly condemn this! This is the ultimate antithesis to wu wei, or innacion.

The similarities between these two metaphysical ideologies are striking, but the differences run deep. The true reality is probably that each of these ideas are a product of their times. Tao, Wu Wei, and balance are ideas clearly inspired by the unstable times of ancient China. The Hegelian dialect is clearly a response to the metaphysical debate brought about by Kant and the sceptics. In my view, Hegel probably was also influenced by a the hyper-competitive intellectual milieu of Germany and Europe as a whole in the early 19th century.

Whatever the case may be, I think it’s fascinating that the eastern sages unknowingly weighed in on an intense metaphysical debate a couple thousand years before it occurred, and on a totally different continent too.