ABSTRACT
‘Dialectics’ is that form of logic which, without denying the validity of the principle of contradiction, 171 maintains that all truth must be expressed in the form of self-contradictory statements. Although it is the admitted standard of all true statements about what is, the principle of contradiction can never be actually observed in propositions which concern true reality itself (as distinct from the world which we have manufactured around us as a kind of environment to suit our biological and social needs). The presence of contradictions indicates a radical flaw in whatever may contain them. They show that something is either completely irreal and false (as movement when subjected to the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea), or only partially true (as in the dialectics of Hegel), or in the process of annihilating itself (as in Marxism when applied to the ‘contradictions’ of capitalism). In the Mahāyāna, where everything apart from the Absolute is false and unable to maintain itself, all non-absolute events will be shot through with contradictions which are the tokens of their ultimate irreality. The Absolute itself, again, will also have to be defined in contradictory terms, because only a ‘superlogic’ 172 can do justice to it.
