ABSTRACT
This lecture has been entitled “Discussions.” 1 Such a title announces a genre of discourse, the dialéktikè, the theses, arguments, objections, and refutations that Aristotle's Topics and On Sophistical Refutations analyze and seek to bring within norms. The “greater” dialectics, speculative dialectics, dismisses this genre as frivolous: “Objections—if they really are connected to the thing against which they are directed—are one-sided determinations. … These one-sided determinations, insofar as they are connected to the thing, are moments of its concept; they are thus brought forth in their momentary place daring the latter's exposition, and their negation within the dialectic immanent to the concept must be demonstrated. …” This is so much the case that in regard to a work which seeks to compile objections, such as the one undertaken by Göschel (the author of the Aphorisms commented upon here by Hegel), “Science could demand that such work be superfluous, since it would arise only through thought's lack of culture and through the impatience proper to the frivolity of defective thought.” 2 Science, in the Hegelian sense, does not simply brush aside the dialéktikè as did Aristotelian didactics. It encloses the dialéktikè within its own genre, speculative discourse. In this genre, the two of dialéktikè, which is what provides material for paralogisms and aporias, is put into the service of the didactic end, the one. There is no true discussion.
