Since our immediate understanding of an object may very well be fallacious it was seen as a philosophical task to critique the workings of our cognizing abilities.

In order for science to pertain to what essentially is its goal, namely knowledge, it has in history of thought before Hegel been seen necessary to criticize our cognition, with which we ‘take hold of’ the truth. Knowledge, Consciousness and the Dialectical Movement In the case at hand, it is my claim that one cannot fully comprehend the implications of a transformational approach to conflict without referring to what is implicitly its discursive founder and ‘primary coordinates’: Hegel and Hegelian dialectics. In the discourse of psychoanalysis, Karl Jung and Melanie Klein refer to Sigmund Freud in the same way as within Marxism, Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno refer to Karl Marx. Authors that come after these founders of discursivity cannot write within the tradition without referring to the founder. By that they open up a space both for analogies but also difference, being the difference from that very foundation which is given by a founder of discursivity. These authors “have produced something else: the possibilities and rules for formation of other texts1” 3. This opens the possibility for Foucault to speak of a certain kind of authors: ‘founders of discursivity’.

If we broaden the concept of an author, as Foucault invites us to do, we can speak of authors of a discipline, a theory, a tradition, etc. The transcendental role of the author becomes that of guaranteeing a discursive structure: “The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture” 2. This negative singularity is, however, enough to establish the transcendental character of the author in the act of analysis, collecting a body of works under the same umbrella of analysis. “As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence” 1. His inquiry takes as a point of departure the post-modern principle “the death of the author”: the idea that one should refer only to the work at hand in the interpretation of this work the life and personal experiences of the author is not a valid basis to found an interpretation. In his short essay “What is an Author”, French philosopher Michel Foucault gives a convincing explanation why. An effort will be given to trace the approach of Conflict Transformation down to what I consider to be its Hegelian roots and by that invite the reader to reflect on the relevance of Hegelian thought in their work.įirst of all, the central question seems to be: why look to Hegel to approach dialectics and not a newer, more accessible theory of dialectics, which has had the chance to adopt criticisms and thus been made stronger? Many great dialecticians have followed so why study Hegel? The analysis of Hegelian dialectics at its root will lead to a discussion on the dialectical roots of Conflict Transformation as found in Lederach. Hegel in his “Introduction” to his seminal work Phenomenology of the Spirit, I will with Foucault try to understand better what it means to be the founder of a discourse in the way Hegel is and why we ought to understand Hegel to talk about his followers, explicit or not.

What I hope to convey, however, is an increased reflection on these issues in order to create local answers informed by the fundamental vocabulary on social progress in Hegelian dialectics.īefore addressing in detail the line of analysis for the (in)famous German philosopher G.W.F. What are the conceptual processes in the workings and transformations of conflicts, how can we understand obstacles to development in a broader theoretical framework, and how do we know that what we are doing is actually creating a positive development? This article should be seen as provisional remarks rather than definite answers to these problems. Working with conflicts it may sometimes be profitable to take a step back and conceive of the overall change that one is trying to forge.

Hegelian dialectic theory