What is the dialectical method?

G.W.F. Hegel, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

G.W.F. Hegel answers

The dialectical method is not, let me say at once, what the textbooks have made of it. The schema of thesis, antithesis, synthesis — that pedagogical convenience — never appears in my writings in this form, and it flattens into a mechanical procedure what is in truth the living movement of thought against itself. What I call the dialectical moment is the self-sublation of finite determinations by themselves and their transition into their opposites.¹

Notice what this means: the negation does not come from outside, from a philosopher who decides to oppose one proposition to another. The finite determination, when followed rigorously in its own content, generates the contradiction from within itself. Everything finite is this — the sublating of itself.² The dialectic is therefore the immanent process of going beyond a determination, wherein the one-sided and limited character of the understanding's categories presents itself as what it is, namely as their negation.

This is why the dialectic constitutes the moving soul of scientific progression, the principle through which alone an immanent connection and necessity enters into the content of science.³ Without it, what passes for systematic philosophy is merely an aggregate of assertions, each standing beside the others with no inner bond. The higher dialectic — and I distinguish it sharply from the merely negative kind — does not rest content with producing the opposite of a given determination and calling that result the truth.⁴

Ancient skepticism did this, and certain modern half-measures approximate it. Such a dialectic remains abstract because it seizes only the negative result, the bare contradiction, and stops there. The genuine dialectical movement produces and apprehends the positive content and result which the negation contains — and it is this alone that makes it development and immanent progression. Aufhebung, the concept I use for this operation, names precisely the threefold sense: cancellation of the one-sided determination, preservation of its truth-moment, and elevation to a higher unity in which that moment is no longer merely one-sided.⁵

The dialectic is accordingly not an external activity of subjective thought brought to bear on a passive content.⁶ It is the very soul of the content which puts forth its branches and fruit organically. The philosopher who thinks rationally does not impose reason on the object from outside; the object is itself rational for itself, and the sole business of science is to make conscious the work that the reason of the thing accomplishes on its own.⁷

What the understanding takes to be a stable, isolated determination — fixed in its either-or — the dialectic shows to be in relation, and in that relation, in the process of passing over into what it is not.⁸ Cognition, as I traced it in the early Jena logic, is precisely this movement: the self-equivalent reflection that preserves itself through sublating the content that is other than it, making that other into an other-than-itself, so that what seemed alien is posited as sublated.⁹

The ground that claims to be the self-subsistent basis of a construction discovers, when followed through its own deductive process, that it has become merely one moment in the totality it was supposed to ground — and so must itself be grounded, in an infinite regress that the genuine dialectic dissolves by grasping the universal as the whole movement rather than as one fixed side.¹⁰

The person of philosophical maturity, like the person of genuine life-experience, does not cling to the abstract either-or.¹¹ The dialectical method is what thought looks like when it has grown past that clinging.

Sources

The dialectical moment is the self-sublation of such finite determinations by themselves and their transition into their opposites.
Encyclopedia Logic, pp. 148–149
Everything finite is this, the sublating of itself. Thus, the dialectical moment constitutes the moving soul of the scientific progression and is the principle through which alone an immanent connection and necessity enters into the content of science.
Encyclopedia Logic, pp. 148–149
the dialectical moment constitutes the moving soul of the scientific progression and is the principle through which alone an immanent connection and necessity enters into the content of science
Encyclopedia Logic, pp. 148–149
Such dialectic may regard as its final result the opposite of a given idea, or, as in the uncompromising manner of ancient scepticism, its contradiction, or, in a lame fashion, an approximation to the truth, which is a modern half-measure.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 114–115
The higher dialectic of the concept consists not merely in producing and apprehending the determination as an opposite and limiting factor, but in producing and apprehending the positive content and result which it contains; and it is this alone which makes it a development and immanent progression.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 114–115
This dialectic, then, is not an external activity of subjective thought, but the very soul of the content which puts forth its branches and fruit organically.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 114–115
To consider something rationally means not to bring reason to bear on the object from outside in order to work upon it, for the object is itself rational for itself...and the sole business of science is to make conscious this work which is accomplished by the reason of the thing itself.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, pp. 114–115
Reflexion is at first a process of going beyond the isolated determinacy, i.e. a relating of it, whereby it is brought into a relationship, despite its being maintained in its isolated validity. The dialectic is, by contrast, this immanent process of going beyond [such determinacy] wherein the one-sided and limited character of the determinations of the understanding presents itself as what it is, namely as their negation.
Encyclopedia Logic, pp. 148–149
Cognition is therefore the self-equivalent reflection into itself, which...has as a universal another content than itself, whose movement, however, it is. The self-equivalence of cognition preserves itself in virtue of its sublating the content, which is other than it, making [it] into an other than itself.
The Jena System 1804-5 Logic and Metaphysics, pp. 128–129
As negative unity it incorporates the antithesis of what is grounded, while as determinate, it is itself once again only a moment, which as negative one must be deduced but which can itself exist merely as moment in a proof for which the one is to constitute the ground. Being this determinate content, the ground must be deduced, and so on in an infinite regress.
The Jena System 1804-5 Logic and Metaphysics, p. 127
It is the way of youth to relish abstractions, whereas a person with the experience of life does not indulge in the abstract either-or, clinging instead to what is concrete.
Encyclopedia Logic, pp. 148–149