HEGELIAN DIALECTICS (JESUIT PHILOSOPHY) Hegelian dialectics is being used around the world as a tool to break down traditional beliefs with the objective of replacing them with something new.
It was Hegel's view that all things unfold in a continuing evolutionary process whereby each idea or quality (the THESIS) inevitably brings forth its opposite (the ANTITHESIS). From that interaction, a third state emerges in which the opposites are integrated, overcome, and fulfilled in a richer and higher SYNTHESIS. This synthesis then becomes the basis for another dialectical process of opposition and synthesis. Hegel believed that the creative stress of opposing positions was essential for developing higher states of consciousness. In the moment of synthesis, the opposites are both preserved and transcended, negated and fulfilled (Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson, Spiritual Politics, 1994, p. 88).
Hegel believed that this process has a life of its own, in an evolutionary sense, but since the days of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels it has been used as a guided process toward a desired end.
The objective of Hegelian dialectics in this sense is to replace something old with something new (e.g., capitalism with communism, traditional Bible doctrine with theological modernism, a traditional educational system based on moral absolutes with a new one based on relativism, an old age with a new).