8 Dialectic and History: Hegel, Marx, and the Becoming of Possibility

If Kant bounded possibility within the structures of cognition, Hegel and Marx reanimated it within the movement of history itself. Here, construal was no longer primarily a matter of abstract categories or transcendental conditions, but a dynamic process in which possibility unfolded, conflicted, and was realised through reflexive engagement with material and social conditions.

Hegel’s dialectic reconceived being and thought as relational and historical. Possibility is not static; it emerges in the interplay of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — a self-developing rational movement in which contradictions are not merely obstacles but productive inflections in the becoming of the world. The individual and the collective are interwoven: consciousness realises itself through participation in historical totality, and reality is construed as the progressive actualisation of Spirit. In this framework, construal itself is historical, reflexive, and integrally tied to the unfolding of possibility.

Marx, in turn, materialised the dialectic. He shifted the focus from abstract Spirit to social and economic relations as the medium through which possibility is cut and structured. History is a terrain of struggle and production, and potentialities are realised or constrained through modes of labour, property, and class relations. Possibility is therefore immanent in material conditions, yet not reducible to them: it is shaped, contested, and reconfigured through human praxis. Construal becomes both interpretive and active — the way humans collectively engage with and transform the conditions of their existence.

Together, Hegel and Marx inaugurate a re-cut of construal in which history, materiality, and reflexivity converge. Possibility is neither purely transcendent, abstract, nor merely mental; it is relational, temporal, and enacted. The dialectical process opens a horizon in which potential is constantly in motion, revealing that reality itself is an outcome of dynamic construal, a becoming that is neither fixed nor predetermined.

In this historical turn, the landscape of possibility is understood as both structured and contingent, as shaped by forces beyond immediate control yet continually reconfigured through conscious action. Philosophy, for the first time, treats the actualisation of potential as inseparable from historical process, laying the groundwork for a conception of construal that is reflexive, material, and ceaselessly evolving.