George Novack
An Introduction to the Logic Of Marxism: LECTURE IV
In this lecture we are going to discuss the historical origins, achievements and significance of a revolution. This particular revolution did not occur in politics or economics but in the domain of ideas. The author of this revolution was a German professor, Georg Hegel, who lived from 1770 to 1831. He revolutionised the science of the thought process by demonstrating the limitations of the basic laws of formal logic and setting forth on new principled foundations a superior system of logic known as dialectics.
Hegel’s revolution in logic was connected with other revolutionary events. It was an integral part of that colossal social revolutionary movement which swept over the Western world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and culminated in the replacement by the bourgeois system of feudalism and of long-standing pre-capitalist forms and forces in all departments of social life. Every genuine social revolution is an all-inclusive and profoundly penetrating process which reaches into the recesses of the whole social order and reconstructs everything from its material foundations of production to the cultural superstructure and its philosophical heights. Thus the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movements engendered by the growth and expansion of capitalism radically transformed not only men’s methods of production, their political relationships and their morals, but also their minds.
Profound changes in their conditions of life and work produced no less thoroughgoing changes in men’s habits of thought. New ways of thought in industrial and scientific practice led in turn to the demand for a more developed form of logic and for a superior theory of knowledge to deal with the freshly accumulated materials of knowledge.
Hegel, together with Kant and the rest of the revolutionary German school of philosophy, was fully conscious of the crying need of modern knowledge for a proper method of thought and of the inability of the ancient logic to fill the requirements. In the preface to his Logic he wrote: “The form and content of Logic has remained the same as that inherited by long tradition — a tradition which in being handed down had become ever more meagre and attenuated; there are no traces in Logic of the new spirit which has arisen both in Learning and in Life. It is, however, (let us say it once for all), quite vain to try to retain the forms of an earlier stage of development when the inner structure of spirit has become transformed; these earlier forms are like withered leaves which are pushed off by the new buds already being generated at the roots.” “The new spirit” Hegel refers to is his way of denominating the consequences of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
Hegel set about to devise a logic “adequate to the lofty development of the sciences” and necessary” for securing scientific progress.” This new method of thought was dialectics. As the systematiser of the dialectical method, Hegel must be regarded as the founder of modern logic, just as Copernicus was the father of modern astronomy, Harvey of physiology, and Dalton of chemistry. As a matter of fact, since Hegel, not a single new law of dialectics has been discovered in addition to those listed by him.
Hegel once said: “The condemnation which a great man lays upon the world is to force it to explain him.” This is certainly true of Hegel himself Hegel has always presented a most perplexing problem. How could this peaceful professor, a civil servant of the Prussian government, whose political views became increasingly conservative as he grew older and more celebrated, bear a revolution inside his mind and give birth to it?
A similar contradiction can be observed in the reactions provoked by Hegel’s ideas. During his lifetime and for a decade after his death he was at one and the same time the darling of orthodox circles and the intellectual inspiration of the most radical.
In any case, whatever attitude was assumed toward Hegel, whether you accepted or rejected his ideas and method, whatever you took from him, you could not remain indifferent to him. This testified to the explosive force of his ideas. People can and generally do remain indifferent to ideas that do not threaten the status quo or the established body of knowledge. But they are instantly galvanised into attention and action when some genuinely new ideas and vital influences appear on the scene. Nobody nowadays can remain indifferent to Marxism because its ideas have demonstrated themselves as revolutionary powers. No psychologist dares ignore the findings of Freud.
Real revolutionists in all fields of thought and deed call forth stormy controversies and conflicting estimates. You could hate John Brown and hang him, as the reactionaries did in 1859, or you could hail him as a martyr to the cause of human emancipation. But you could not ignore John Brown’s body, his spirit and his deeds. It is the same with Lenin and Trotsky in our generation, with Freud and Einstein today as with Darwin yesterday, and with Bruno and Galileo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Hegel’s thought swept like a tornado through the dust-laden halls of philosophy, unsettling everything and compelling everyone to come to terms with the powerful ideas he had unloosed. The world of thought has never been the same since Hegel passed through. The controversies that raged around him have not ceased to the present day.
Here we are defending Hegel against his detractors over a hundred years after his death.
Academicians have tried to tame Hegel, to emasculate and mutilate his thought, to transform him into a harmless icon, as they do with all dead revolutionists, including Marx. In vain. Hegel’s real revolutionary ideas keep breaking through their conventionalised versions, just as they forced their way out of his own idealistic system.
Reactions to Hegel are as extreme today as in his own time. He calls forth enraged, venomous hostility from all hardened formalists, all anti-dialecticians. James Burnham in his flight from Marxism called Hegel “the century-dead arch-muddler of human thought.” (In Defence of Marxism, p. 190.) Max Eastman pays him the ambiguous compliment of being “the most ingenious of all disguised theologians.” (Marxism: Is It Science? p. 38.)
This is the prevailing opinion of Hegel in official academic circles of the United States. William James, the father of pragmatism, never wearied of assailing Hegel for his absolutism and his “block universe.” John Dewey and Santayana republished books implying that Hegel was responsible for Hitlerism, seeking to identify him with the worst reaction. Vice-President Wallace declared on March 8, 1942: “Hegel laid broad and deep the philosophy of the totalitarian state.”
The attitude of Dewey is especially significant, since Dewey began his philosophical career as a Hegelian — and with leftist shadings at that — and is well-versed in Hegel’s thought. Yet in his conscious mind he completely turned away from Hegel. This ex-disciple of Hegel does not even mention his former teacher or his ideas in his own work, Logic, published in 1938.
While Dewey was preparing his Logic for the press, I asked, even urged, him to deal with Hegel’s logic in his own treatise. His answer indicated that in the field of logic Hegel was today of no account, a “dead dog”. And indeed, so he has become for the main school of thought of American liberalism.
Marxists have an altogether different estimate of Hegel and his work. We honour him as a titan of thought, “a genius” (Trotsky), who made an imperishable contribution to human thought in his dialectical method. Hegel has other admirers in the academic dovecotes. But the fossilised professional philosophers honour Hegel for reasons diametrically different from those of Marxists. The academic Hegelians fasten themselves to the conservative sides of Hegel, on everything that is dead: to his system, to his idealism, to his apology for religion. Following his death a similar division among Hegel’s disciples took place in Germany between Old and Young Hegelians, between conservatives and radicals, between religious devotees and atheist critics of religion.
Hegel must obviously be a most complex historical phenomenon, if we judge by these objective consequences of his thought. In truth, the philosopher of contradiction was himself a contradictory philosopher. That makes him a hard nut to crack. His enemies say there’s no use trying to crack open his system of ideas; you’ll find nothing inside but the decayed substance of religious and metaphysical ideas. We say, on the contrary, there’s a rich treasury of thought concealed under its outer shell of idealism.
Hegel, like all other great figures of the capitalist epoch, had both revolutionary and reactionary sides. In this lecture we shall consider only the first and examine the second later. Newton was a pious, even superstitious, Protestant; yet that did not prevent him from revolutionising the science of physics. Hobbes, the ruthless materialist, was nonetheless a supporter of absolutism against the Cromwellians. Faraday, the discoverer of the induction of electrical currents, was a member of the small sect of Sandemanians. The physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, believed in communication with the dead.
All figures must be judged in connection with the conditions of their time, and not by some timeless absolute standards. “The truth is always concrete.” Robespierre is the outstanding revolutionary leader of the plebeian democracy even though he sought to revive the worship of the Supreme Being at the height of the French Revolution. John Brown cannot be thrown out of the pantheon of revolutionists because this petty-bourgeois revolutionist believed in God and private property. You cannot apply the same inflexible set of standards to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of rebellious black slaves on the island of Haiti at the end of the nineteenth century, and to a proletarian revolutionary leader of today. Dialecticians must learn to see everyone and everything in their proper historical place, their correct proportions, in their necessary contradictions .
Burnham and his colleagues can no more grasp the contradictory nature of Hegel and his thought than they can the contradictory character of the USSR. Just as they see only the abominations of Stalinism in the Soviet Union today, so they see nothing but outmoded metaphysics in Hegel’s work. Burnham wrote in “Science and Style”: “During the 125 years since Hegel wrote, science has progressed more than during the entire preceding history of mankind. During the same period, after 2,300 years of stability, logic has undergone a revolutionary transformation . . . in which Hegel and his ideas have had an influence of exactly zero.” (In Defence of Marxism, p. 190. )
This is exactly 100 per cent wrong. As in other questions, Burnham reverses the real relations and stands everything on its head. Logic has undergone a revolutionary transformation — but it was precisely “Hegel and his ideas” which initiated that revolution. Let us try to explain this enigma which so baffles Burnham and all formalists when they run up against Hegel’s thought.
Hegel knew that he had revolutionised philosophy but he explained the origins and essence of that revolution one-sidedly and therefore incorrectly. He wrote: “All revolutions, in the sciences, no less than in general history, originate only in this, that the spirit of man, for the understanding and comprehending of himself, has now altered his categories, uniting himself in a truer, deeper, more inner and intimate relation with himself.” Misled by his idealist standpoint and outlook, Hegel conceived the revolution he had wrought as arising within the minds of men by means of a change in their categories of thought. It was an event belonging essentially to the world of “spirit” or ideas, involving transformations of men’s conceptual relations. It was not a necessary outgrowth of the social environment at a specific stage of its evolution, arising primarily from changes in the material relations of men.
Dialectical materialists give an entirely different explanation of Hegel’s work. If it were asked: Why and how did this change of ideas come about? Hegel would answer, By reason of the contradictory factors within each system of ideas, their contention, and their resolution. We materialists answer: This begs the question. It explains changes in ideas by changes in ideas. This type of explanation is far too superficial and restricted.
Revolutionary developments in the world of ideas have to be explained as the result of a preceding overturn in the material world. In fact this intellectual revolution had its real roots and its ultimate driving force in the central social revolutionary movement of the epoch: the rise and world conquest of capitalism. Note, however, that we derived the principle of this explanation from no one other than Hegel himself, who taught that any thing cannot be explained by itself and through itself, as the formalists who base themselves on the law of identity thought, but only by another and through another. And not any other, but its own other. Here we turn Hegel’s method against his own conclusion — and that is precisely what Marxist materialism has done on a broad scale.
We understand the peculiar nature of capitalism through the social system it grew out of, feudalism, as well as through the social formation it gives birth to, socialism. In order to comprehend anything we have to know not only what it is but also what it is not, that is to say, what it came out of, what it is part of, and what it must become.
From the sixteenth century to Hegel’s advent, the rising forces of capitalism had placed in question, challenged or overthrown virtually all stable and anciently honoured institutions and relations. The productive foundations of the old social order (feudalism, slavery) had been undermined or overturned by the growth of capitalist relations, competition, large-scale industry, and the world market. The English, American and French revolutions had destroyed absolute monarchies and placed new forms of government in their stead.
The history of the eighteenth century was marked by continual warfare between the great powers all over the world, by colonial revolts (the American revolution), and finally by the great civil and national wars emanating from the French revolution. The whole of civilised society was racked by contradictory forces and turned upside down. These colossal, catastrophic conflicts impressed themselves upon men’s minds and turned them upside down too. Men could not work, live or think in the old ways. They were torn out of their ruts and routines and compelled by the force of events to act and think differently, in revolutionary or counter-revolutionary ways.
Historical conditions urgently demanded the creation of a new method of thought. Hegel’s audacious speculations, his revolutionary leaps, which bridged the old world of thought and the new, reflected and expressed these revolutionary impulses vibrating throughout European society. In the course of development, the science of logic ran up against the same predicament as the science of society. The productive techniques and forces of capitalism had outgrown the feudal forms of production. A prolonged conflict took place between the exponents of these irreconcilable social forces. The reactionaries tried their utmost to push the developing forces of capitalist production back into the straitjacket of feudalism. The revolutionary bourgeois elements strove to free them from these fetters and to create more suitable, freer forms of productive relations.
Philosophers were confronted with a similar problem in the field of thought. Should they keep the new forces of intellectual production, which had grown out of and even anticipated the fresh material forces of capitalist production, within the framework of the laws of elementary logic, no matter how false, inadequate, scholasticised these had become? This was the procedure recommended and practiced by conservative thinkers. Or should they release the new intellectual forces from their bondage to formal logic and create a new system of logic in closer conformity to the demands of the development of scientific thought?
This was the course taken by the most progressive philosophers from the time of Bacon and Descartes. They worked to reshape logic along with the reconstruction of society and the other sciences. Instead of endeavouring to make their scientific knowledge more formally logical, they tried to make their logic more scientific. It was Hegel who succeeded in consummating this revolution in logic.
The revolutionary forces of the age were concentrated around the great French revolution of 1789. The French revolution meant to the people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries what the Russian revolution means to us. It divided the civilised world into two opposing camps: for or against the revolution. It kindled revolutionary ideas and trends in politics, in the arts, music, sculpture, poetry (“Then it was bliss to be alive, but to be young was very heaven” — Wordsworth), and in philosophy.
The French revolution was no remote historical event to Hegel. He was its contemporary, being 23 years old when it reached its climax (1793). It was the most active force in his life and thought. He was immersed in its vicissitudes, which directly affected him. Hegel was compelled to finish his first great work, The Phenomenology of Mind on the very eve of the decisive battle of Jena, in which Napoleon broke the Prussian armies and dismembered the kingdom. French soldiers entered Hegel’s house and set it afire just after he had stuffed the last pages of the Phenomenology in his pocket and taken refuge in the house of a high official of the town.
Despite these personal discomforts, Hegel always spoke of the French revolution with enthusiasm. In the Phenomenology he seeks to justify in his idealistic way the revolutionary terror of the Jacobins, which was condemned by all the reactionaries and counter-revolutionists of that time in the same spirit that the Bolshevik terror against the enemies of the Russian revolution is condemned today. This required more than intellectual and moral courage of a high order. This required a revolutionary outlook.
A few days before he was driven from his lodgings, Hegel wrote in a letter to a friend: “I saw the Emperor [Napoleon], that world-soul, riding through the city to reconnoitre. It is in truth a strange feeling to see such an individual before one, who here, from one point, as he rides on his horse, is reaching over the world, and remoulding it . . . All now wish good fortune to the French army, which cannot fail in the immense difference between its leaders and soldiers, and those of its enemies.” (Caird: Hegel p. 66-67.) The equivalent today would be a rapturous response of an intellectual — in Germany — hailing the advance of the Soviet Army.
In another letter Hegel wrote: “The French nation, by the bath of its revolution, has been freed from many institutions which the spirit of man has left behind like its baby shoes, and which therefore weighed upon it, as they still weigh upon others, as lifeless fetters. What, however, is more, the individuals of that nation have, in the shock of revolution, cast off the fear of death and the life of custom, which in the change of scene has now ceased to have any meaning in itself. It is this that gives them the prevailing force which they are showing against other nations. Hence especially comes their preponderance over the cloudy and undeveloped spirit of the Germans, who, however, if they are once forced to cast off their inertia, will rouse themselves to action, and preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of their inner life will perchance surpass their teachers. (Caird: Hegel p. 68. )
Hegel’s complaint about” the cloudy and undeveloped spirit of the Germans” refers to the sharp difference between France and Germany. In France the bourgeois democratic revolution was energetically and openly carried through. It had been ushered in by a seething ferment in the world of ideas. The progressive French writers and ideologists carried on continuous warfare with the Church, the State, and recognised authorities in the sciences; they suffered persecution, imprisonment, exile — all the punishments accorded to these so-called subversive activities.
Owing to the social backwardness of conditions in Germany, there the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement and its reflections in the domain of ideas experienced quite a different development and produced different results. In the first part of the nineteenth century, when Hegel came to maturity, the German bourgeoisie proved incapable of launching or completing a genuine revolution in industrial or political life. At the same time the energies diverted from these more material spheres of existence flowed all the more abundantly into the channels of philosophy and there found concentrated and rich expression.
The ideologists of the German bourgeoisie compensated for the economic inferiority, political feebleness and narrow aims of their class by extraordinary boldness and piercing vision in the world of thought. They carried through a revolution in the world of ideas where their more practical kindred failed to carry through their revolution in the world of practical reality. Marx characterised the philosophy of Kant, the founder of the classical German school of philosophy, as “the German theory of the French revolution.” Hegel developed this “German theory” to its highest point in his dialectics.
New and revolutionary ideas in the sciences preceded, accompanied, and issued from the rise of capitalist economy and the ferment of bourgeois-democratic revolutionary politics. The natural sciences — mathematics, mechanics, astronomy — were beginning to move forward with rapid strides and were placed on new foundations.
Later these and other sciences — geology, palaeontology, chemistry, geography, biology, botany, physiology, anatomy — advanced and were one by one revolutionised. Goethe, Treviranus, Lamarck brought the conception of development into botany and biology.
The social sciences, too, were revived and transformed. Political economy was created. Political science together with political parties came into existence. The perplexing problems presented by the English and French revolution gave a powerful impulse to the science of history. Men pondered on the motive forces of history and began to seek the motive forces of historical evolution elsewhere than in divine Providence. Hegel, for example, sought in his Philosophy of History to explain the dynamics of historical development. He failed, but his magnificent failure led to the correct solution provided by Marx’s method of historical materialism.
The scientific workers in these various fields tried to cram the new materials of knowledge they had collected or the new laws they had discovered into the old categories of thought they had inherited. They revolutionised their scientific practices long before they consciously and completely revolutionised their habits and method of thought. Most of them tried, for example, to reconcile their discoveries with established religious ideas with which they were obviously incompatible, or at least to avoid direct conflict with ecclesiastical authorities.
Even after many had set aside religious fears or prepossessions, scientists continued to regard nature as fundamentally unchanging and unchangeable; the laws they set forth as eternal; motion as purely and simply mechanical. They lacked, in a phrase, the conception of universal development.
’The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a natural scientist but by a philosopher,” points out Engels in Dialectics of Nature (p. 8). “In 1755 appeared Kant’s General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.” Kant’s discovery that “the earth and the whole solar system . . . had come into being in the course of time . . . contained the point of departure for all further progress. If the earth were something that had come into being, then its present geological, geographical and climatic state, and its plants and animals likewise, must be something that had come into being; it must have had a history not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time.”
This revolutionary idea of Kant, which was to be developed far more comprehensively and profoundly by Hegel, was the outcome of a prolonged process of philosophical labor extending over several centuries. The revolution in philosophy burst forth not all at once but unfolded by degrees. Just as the bourgeois merchants, bankers, industrialists and their agents attacked and sapped the foundations and institutions of feudalism from below in economic, political and military affairs, so the ideologists of the bourgeoisie assailed and undermined feudalism from on high in the more rarefied realms of theory. They challenged the basic ideas of Christianity, first through the Protestant reform, and eventually in a revolutionary atheistic spirit. They undertook a fierce warfare against the ideas and method of scholasticism, the ideological buttresses of Catholicism and the feudal order. They recreated materialism.
The Hegelians, and after them the Marxists, were not the first or only philosophical schools to feel the inadequacy of Aristotle’s logic petrified by the scholastics or to seek a better logic. Bourgeois thinkers had begun to rebel against the restraints of formal logic, which had grown intolerable in their dead scholasticised versions, as early as the sixteenth century. Bacon opened the struggle in England, Descartes in France. From that time until Hegel, one after another of the outstanding European philosophers sought to formulate a method of their own to supersede formal logic and to cope with the problems posed by the growth of the other sciences. Bacon’s Norum Organum, Descartes, Discourse on Method, Hobbes’ mechanical method, Spinoza’s geometrical method, Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding represent milestones along this road. Locke, for example, concludes his essay as follows: “The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation — who would take a view of human knowledge to the whole extent of it. And, perhaps, if they were distinctly weighed and duly considered, they would afford us another logic and critic than what we have been acquainted with.” (p. 608. )
The most sustained and successful attempt along this line was made by the classical German philosophers beginning with Kant, continuing through Fichte and Schelling, and culminating in Hegel. What his precursors had sought, Hegel found; where they failed, he succeeded. But Hegel would never have succeeded in developing his dialectic without the failures of his predecessors. Their failures provided the preconditions and were necessary elements in his success. In the end, through Hegel and Marx, their failures became successful.
This dialectical lesson from the history of logic should not be lost on revolutionists. Success is not simply success, nor failure simply failure, as the formalists think and say. Every success has some failure; every failure some success in it — and they can be transformed one into the other under certain conditions. Witness the development and degeneration of the Russian revolution — and now its prospective regeneration!
Hegel’s thought and especially his dialectical method represented the consummation of German classical philosophy and of the great Greek philosophy of antiquity. It was the theoretical outcome of the philosophical progress of Western civilisation for four centuries. Hegel explicitly stated that his philosophy was the crown of the preceding two thousand years of philosophical thought and that the principal achievements of thought since the Greeks had been incorporated into his work. This was no boastful exaggeration but the sober truth.
This gives Hegel’s work its world-historical significance. He stands at the highest peak of a gigantic social-revolutionary movement, the greatest in history before socialism. His work embraces and summarises in concentrated theoretical form the results of centuries of intellectual labor by the greatest of human minds. Hegel’s philosophy not only expressed the results of these vast movements in society and science but itself gave an impulse in many fields to movements which are still changing the world. Among these is our own Marxist movement.
“The German workers,” said Engels, “are the heirs of the classical German philosophy.” This is equally true of the entire international working class. That is why we honour Hegel. The best way to honour this great thinker is to study his work and to understand his ideas. This we shall do in more detail in the next lecture.