Introduction To The Birth of Western Dialectic Philosophy

Trying to trace an idea back to its historical source can be like digging in quicksand -- no matter how deep you dig, the quicksand (idea) keeps getting deeper. Indeed, you may get the feeling of all this fresh quicksand piling around you, above your head even, surrounding you, and you start to wonder very strongly -- with increasing anxiety and sense of losing control -- whether you maybe better not climb back to the surface again and forget you even started digging. Either that or go get an excavator!

So it is with the idea of 'the dialectic' -- which exploded into Western philosophy, then Eastern philosophy, most famously through Hegel and then significantly modified even more famously (or infamously) through Marx.

Which is not to say that the idea of the dialectic just magically appeared out of nowhere. All ideas have a history -- a geneology -- and the idea of the dialectic goes back in name as far as Socrates, goes back even significantly further, almost to the beginning of Western philosophy in concept as far as the second oldest known Western philosopher -- Anaxamander -- and his indirect student -- Heraclitus -- the pre-Socratic version of Plato and Aristotle or the later one-two punch of Hegel and Marx).

The historical interpretation and analysis that I am about to conduct here is all part of an attempted massive philosophy re-integration and re-vitalization process with which I aim to give a 'Dialectical Gap-Bridging Prescription Shot' to both Western philosophical history and many aspects of current Western society. Will this prescription shot fall on deaf ears? Possibly or probably. But generally speaking, ideas that are good and strong enough to carry their weight, will not entirely fall on deaf ears. And the largest snowball starts with the first few snowflakes bound together, the largest ocean starts with the first few water drops bound together. Where there is unity in numbers, starting with small numbers and progressing with passion to larger ones, there exists the very real opportunity for serious evolutionary growth. The type of evolutionary philosopohical growth that we are looking for here is in a 'multi-dialectical-democratic-humanistic-existential' direction; extremist philosophy either at the 'narcissistic' end of the spectrum or at the 'self-denial' end of the spectrum is not what we are looking for.

Put another way, we are looking for a type of philosophy that strives for an ideal of optimal self and civil balance. A multi-dialectical-democratic or worded otherwise, a dialectical-gap-bridging-optimal balance philosophy is what we are looking for in DGB Philosophy-Psychology-Politics...and the earliest roots of it can be found in Pre-Socratic philosophy. When most philosophers think back to early Greek and Western philosophy, they generally think of 'The Big Three' as being Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. I am here to trumpet the huge but usually underestimated influence of a different big three or maybe four ancient philosophers -- two from the area of Greece and one, two, or more from China. These are, in my opinion, the three or four most important ancient dialectic philosophers (or groups of philosophers) and I will now identify them as such: 1. Anaxamander; 2. Heraclitus; 3. Confucious; and 4. the Han Philosophers. Let us find out more about them.