The dialectical movement, for Hegel, isn’t “thesis, antithesis, synethesis.” This is nowhere in Hegel. Instead, Hegel’s movement is “negation of a negation.” Let me illustrate this with an example from “Perception.”
Let’s talk about a glass of water on the table. I experienced it as a simple glass. I posit that as a claim about the object: “the glass is a unity.” However, this glass also has many different properties. I now realize that this glass isn’t the simple object that I thought it was, but now posit it as something that is many different sensory properties. However, I’ve lost the glass now, and have just a plethora of properties. I then negate the many properties, returning to the simple, unified glass. For Hegel, this pattern is the dialectical movement of thinking. However, the glass is “both” unified and diverse.
This has been called “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” but this doesn’t actually involve synthesis.
It is very close to a synthesis, except with a synethesis, you are combining things together. In the synthesis, I combine the different properties into a unity, but have to either take myself as the source of the unity or my senses as the source of the diversity. Hegel instead uses “negations” because it returns you back to where you start. His term “aufheben” expresses that you simultaneously “remove something and also keep it.” So instead of a synthesis, the terms are like two sides of an algebraic equation: the positive “unity” on one end, the negative “diversity” on the other. But you have an equality, rather than a combination.
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