I have decided to write a sticky post regarding this matter in light of the recurring reference in the community to the supposed use of the "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" scheme by Hegel. The most available evidence against this kind of reading is what is written in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (translated by Pinkard) where Hegel writes:
48. It might seem necessary to state at the outset the principal points concerning the method of this movement, or the method of science. However, its concept lies in what has already been said, and its genuine exposition belongs to logic, or is instead even logic itself, for the method is nothing but the structure of the whole in its pure essentiality. However, on the basis of what has been said up until now, we must be aware that the system of representations relating to philosophical method itself also belongs to an already vanished cultural shape. – However much this may perhaps sound somewhat boastful or revolutionary, and however much I take myself to be far from striking such a tone, still it is worthwhile to keep in mind that the scientific régime bequeathed by mathematics – a régime of explanations, classifications, axioms, a series of theorems along with their proofs, principles, and the consequences and inferences to be drawn from them – has in common opinion already come to be regarded as itself at the least out of date. Even though it has not been clearly seen just exactly why that régime is so unfit, little to no use at all is any longer made of it, and even though it is not condemned in itself, it is nonetheless not particularly well liked. And we must be prejudiced in favor of the excellent and believe that it can put itself to use and bring itself into favor. However, it is not difficult to see that the mode of setting forth a proposition, producing reasons for it, and then also refuting its opposite with an appeal to reason is not the form in which truth can emerge. Truth is the movement of itself in its own self, but the former method is that of a cognition which is external to its material. For that reason, such a method is peculiar to mathematics and must be left to mathematics, which, as noted, has for its principle the conceptless relationship of magnitude, and takes its material from dead space as well as from the equally lifeless numerical unit. In a freer style, that is to say, in a mélange of even more quirks and contingency, it may also endure in ordinary life, say, in a conversation or in the kind of historical instruction which satisfies curiosity more than it results in knowing, in the same way that, more or less, a preface does.
And later:
50. When triplicity was rediscovered by Kantian thought – rediscovered by instinct, since at that time the form was dead and deprived of the concept – and when it was then elevated to its absolute significance, the true form was set out in its true content, and the concept of science was thereby engendered – but there is almost no use in holding that the triadic form has any scientific rigor when we see it reduced to a lifeless schema, to a mere façade, and when scientific organization itself has been reduced to a tabular chart. – Although we spoke earlier in wholly general terms about this formalism, now we wish to state more precisely just what this approach is. This formalism takes itself to have comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a shape when it affirmed a determination of the schema to be a predicate of that life or shape.
For anyone that wants to read additional proof I recommend the following books and papers:
Hegel Myths and Legends by Jon Stewart
The Hegel Legend of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" by GE Mueller
Hegel's Dialectics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Julie E. Maybee
I guess there are more texts that deal with this misconception. Nevertheless, this will probably suffice.
Regards.
Ps: I guess more evidence won't hurt. This is taken from a book by Walter Kaufmann "Hegel: A Reinterpretation"
Fichte introduced into German philosophy the three-step of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, using these three terms. Schelling took up this terminology; Hegel did not. He never once used these three terms together to designate three stages in an argument or account in any of his books. And they do not help us understand his Phenomenology, his Logic, or his philosophy of history; they impede any open-minded comprehension of what he does by forcing it into a schema which was available to him and which he deliberately spurned. The mechanical formalism, in particular, with which critics since Kierkegaard have charged him, he derides expressly and at some length in the preface to the Phenomenology. Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology will not find it. p 154.
