c conflict is one of ideas rather than personalities, or in which personalities enact ideas particularly political ones. His characters, indeed, stake out sociopolitical positions that become moral abstractions, and it is the abstractions, not the characters, that are of overarching concern. Brecht's name for this mode of presentation is connected to his elaboration of the meaning of the epic theatre ideological superstructure. It is also consistent with the dialectic as an aesthetic and philosophical conceit:
Knowledge of the dialectical categories becomes a force of
thought, a direction finder, helping to orient the "eyes of
the mind" toward a target. Detecting the presence of these
categories in things helps to unravel their vital secrets,
to decipher the hieroglyphics of nature, society, and
thought. The categories are useful as a checklist of key
lines of inquiry, a mental prevision of certain kinds of
universals present in things that facilitates finding them
where they are in fact present, rath
...