Excursus 067 – On Conflict and Reciprocity as Forms of Movement

Hossein Jorjani

First publication: 2026 – 07 – 14

Throughout the history of dialectical thought, conflict has often been treated as its defining characteristic. From Plato through Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, the vocabulary of dialectic increasingly came to revolve around opposition, negation, contradiction, and struggle. By the nineteenth century, conflict was frequently regarded not merely as one feature of dialectic but as its principal driving force.

An alternative perspective emerges, however, if movement itself is taken as the primary category. From this standpoint, conflict is only one possible manifestation of movement rather than its defining essence. Dialectical relations may then be understood as belonging to at least two broad families.

The first consists of conflictual relations, including contradiction, opposition, antagonism, negation, and struggle. These describe forms of movement generated through tension or incompatibility. The second consists of reciprocal relations, including mutual implication, participation, complementarity, interdependence, cooperation, and other forms of mutual determination. These likewise express genuine movement, but without requiring conflict or negation.

This distinction suggests a broader conception of dialectic in which conflict and reciprocity are equally fundamental forms of movement. Neither can be reduced to the other, and both contribute to the dynamic development of natural, social, and conceptual reality. Movement thus becomes the unifying principle, while conflict and reciprocity represent alternative modes through which movement is expressed.

The present classification arose during the editor’s study of Georges Gurvitch’s Dialectique, whose emphasis on mouvement réel (“real movement”) suggested the possibility of placing movement, rather than contradiction, at the centre of dialectical analysis. Whether or not this interpretation fully reflects Gurvitch’s own intentions, it provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of dialectical relations.