An idea · Nineteenth Century · first attested 1807
The Dialectic
Every concept generates its opposite. Their tension resolves at a higher level.
Hegel's engine of thought and history. A position (thesis) implicitly contains its negation (antithesis); the contradiction is resolved by a synthesis that preserves what was true in both. The synthesis itself becomes a new thesis. (Hegel himself rarely used "thesis-antithesis-synthesis"; the formula was popularized later.) Marx inverts the dialectic from idealist to materialist.