The concept of dialectic was already internally contradictory at its Greek birth

Evidence

Everything begins in the same moment, where the becoming essential of the accident and the becoming accidental of essence mutually imply one another. There is nothing beforehand. The dialectic is primordial, indeed it is the origin. When we note the first appearance of the idea of dialectic in the Greek world, something strikes us: the contradiction that marked its definition was already there. Indeed there was barely a generation that had passed, hardly any time at all, before the understanding of the word ‘dialectic’ showed the full extent of its contradictory connotations. For Plato, who invented the concept, dialectic signifies the way Ideas become known. In his sense, dialectic is an essential discourse. Yet in the hands of Aristotle it became a method for deriving syllogisms from plausible propositions. Dialectic, the appropriate form for presenting contingent truths, thus became a discourse of the accidental. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1120

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: A lived example of a concept self-destabilizing at its origin that resonates with how plastic enemy-figures escape their definers from the start.

Related

• The dialectic is primordial and contains its own contradiction from its origin (similarity 0.94)
• The dialectic is primordial and itself the origin, with nothing preceding it. (similarity 0.89)
• Dialectic’s history of oscillation between essential and accidental proves its speculative power (similarity 0.87)
• Dialectic’s essential-accidental oscillation proves its speculative content for Hegel (similarity 0.86)
• Hegel invented the dialectic as a movement of establishing and vanishing determinations (similarity 0.85)
• Dialectic was contradictory in meaning from its very origin between Plato and Aristotle (similarity 0.84)
• Hegel innovated by defining dialectic as simultaneous arising and disappearing (similarity 0.82)
• Dialectics works by letting an opponent’s standpoint move itself to contradiction (similarity 0.81)
• Aristotle adds negativity to the Idea not as change but as difference (similarity 0.80)
• Skeptical dialectic shows equal necessity for contradictory determinations, yielding nullity (similarity 0.79)
• A non-dialectical contradiction stays unresolved and without solution (similarity 0.79)
• The dialectical principle of subject-object reconciliation is Hegel’s invention (similarity 0.79)