ABSTRACT
Within these ancient currents was present the notion of dialectics as a distinct form of reason-
ing. In the West, building on the paradoxes of Zeno that first gave rise to a dialectical method of
thinking, it was Plato who expressed this in dialogical form, a form that remains a key attribute
of the dialectical approach. Pursued through the so-called Socratic method, a hypothesis is
exposed via a series of interlocutions to be contradictory, leading to refutation, synthesis, or a
quantitative shift in thought (see Plato, 1967). This Platonic dialectic-of reasoning through
cross-examination and the constant repositioning of one’s thought-was directed against the
rhetorical techniques of the sophists and demagogues who were concerned solely with persua-
sion rather than the pursuit of truth. Following Plato, for Aristotle, dialectics was a counterpart to
rhetoric, the former concerned with proofs and argumentation, the latter with credibility and
emotions. Dialectical reasoning was a method for reaching positive, epistemological conclusions
or first principles through the logic of the probable (neither sophistic nor apodictic reasoning)
(see Aristotle, 1989). Again, the linkages across the philosophical traditions are here striking.
For this understanding of dialectic as logical debate was also a feature of the Dharmic religious
traditions, particularly the Jainist Syadvada and its most fundamental doctrine of Aneka¯ntava¯da,
non-exclusivity or the multiplicity of viewpoints. This maintained that clinging to any one pos-
ition would commit error because of the intrinsically limited viewpoint of any one subject, which
in turn suggested the necessity of engaging with opposing ways of thinking. One can also see the
formalisation of dialectics in the discourse of the Va¯das that parallels the Platonic notion of
debate through thesis, antithesis, and tarka (argumentation) (see Solomon, 1976). Thematic
debates within these Eastern variations of dialectical thought also paralleled those in the
Western tradition. For example, the Sa¯mkhya school of Hindu philosophy and its dualistic
notions of Purusha (consciousness/mind) and Prakriti (phenomena/matter) contrasted to the
Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna’s categories sought to move beyond ‘either-or’ dualisms to
be ‘both-and’ (see Gier, 1983) Here, the relations between creation (Brahma), order
(Vishnu), and destruction (Shiva) were suggestive of a balance-and mutual implication-
between the principles of harmony and discord underlying all existence. The similarity of this
aspect of Hindu religion to the Dao De Jing needs little explication. The two propositions of
the Ying and Yang are said to contain the other as complementary opposite, each a part of
the whole, in which everything achieves harmony through unification and negation, being
through non-being (Lao Tzu, 1964, p. 40, see also Ling, 2013a).
