George Novack
An Introduction to the Logic Of Marxism: LECTURE V
In the last lecture we pointed out that the broad advance of knowledge on many fronts since the sixteenth century dictated a radical reconstruction of the science of logic, just as the expanding forces of capitalist production required a radical transformation of the economic and political order. In his philosophical work Hegel accomplished this revolution in logic no less boldly than the plebeian revolutionists, the Jacobins, remodelled the French state and society. Hegel’s dialectical method is an achievement in the history of thought comparable only to Aristotle’s.
In this lecture we propose to discuss the chief conceptions of the dialectical method. When we considered the main ideas of formal logic in the first lecture, we began by singling out its three fundamental laws, setting them down in formula fashion, and then proceeded to analyse their applicable features and their defects.
We are obliged to deal with the ideas of the dialectical method in another way. We shall not begin by setting down one or more fundamental laws of dialectics around which the whole system of logic revolves, as we did in the case of formal logic. We shall approach dialectics not as a closed system. On the contrary it is an open system and therefore our approach is elastic, concrete, more informal.
It is important to grasp the motive for this procedure because it arises out of a profound difference in character between formal and dialectical thinking. The basic laws and ideas of formal logic are easily expressible in simple formulas and even equations, because such one-sided generalisations do bring out the inner nature, the true being, of formal thinking. As we have explained, the basic laws of formal logic contain nothing but restatements of one selfsame fixed conception of identity.
Formal logic is no misnomer. Formalism is the very breath of its life — and formalism everywhere tends to breed unconditional and unchanging formulas on the model of the three laws of formal logic, laws which profess to contain the complete content of the reality they deal with. Formalism takes specific and episodic forms manifested in nature, society, and the human mind and regards them as completely hard-and-fast, eternally fixed, unchanging and unconditional.
Dialectics bases itself upon an entirely different standpoint and has a different outlook upon reality and upon its changing forms. Dialectics is the logic of movement, of evolution, of change. Reality is too full of contradictions, too elusive, too manifold, too mutable to be snared in any single form or formula or set of formulas. Each particular phase of reality has its own laws and its own peculiar categories and constellation of categories which are interwoven with those it shares with other phases of reality. These laws and categories have to be discovered by direct investigation of the concrete whole, they cannot be excogitated by mind alone before the material reality is analysed. Moreover, all reality is constantly changing, disclosing ever new aspects of itself which have to be taken into account and which cannot be encompassed in the old formulas, because they are not only different from but often contradictory to them.
The dialectical method seeks to accommodate itself to these fundamental features of reality. It must take them as the starting point and basis of its own procedure. If reality is ever changing, concrete, full of novelty, fluent as a river, torn by oppositional forces, then dialectics, which strives to be a true reflection of reality in logical terms, must share the same characteristics. Dialectical thought too must be concrete, changeable, ever fresh and flowing like a sparkling stream of thought, ready to detect and catch the contradictions in its path.
Dialecticians recognise that all formulas must be provisional, limited, approximate, because all forms of existence are transient and limited. This must also apply to the science of dialectics and to the formulations of its laws and ideas. Since dialectics deals with an ever changing, complex and contradictory reality, its formulas have intrinsic limitations. In its interactions with objective reality and in its own process of self-development connected with that activity, dialectical thinking creates, maintains and then casts aside formulas at each stage of its growth. Dialectics itself grows and changes, often in contradictory fashion, in accordance with the specific material and intellectual conditions governing its development. It has already passed through two crucial stages of development in the idealist version of Hegel and the materialist form of Marxism.
Dialectical thinking, therefore, cannot be completely comprised in any fixed set of formulas, nor can dialectics be codified in the same way and to the same extent as formal logic. To address such a demand to dialectics, to seek to impose perfect formulas upon its processes, betrays a captivity to the method of formal thinking. It is alien to the essential nature, to the living spirit of dialectics as a method of thought. “Theory, my friends, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.” (Goethe)
But this does not at all mean that dialectics is subject to no laws or that these laws cannot be stated in lucid terms. Every logic must be capable of categorical determination and expression. If this were not so, these lectures of mine would be a senseless enterprise and a science of logic would be impossible. Otherwise logical thinking would dissolve into scepticism or into mysticism, which is the outcome of scepticism. Everything that happens is not the result of arbitrary forces but the result of definite and regularly operating laws. This is true of the mental processes with which logic directly concerns itself. The laws of mental processes exist. They can be discovered, known, used.
Dialectics incorporates within its own system and uses the apparatus of formal logic: strict definition, classification, coordination of categories, syllogism, judgment, etc. But it makes these tools of thought its servants and the servants, not the master, of the thought process. These elements of logical thought must adapt themselves to the process of reality and to the reality of thought. They cannot be permitted to overstep the bounds of their usefulness and force both objective reality and thought to adapt themselves to its mechanisms, as the hidebound formalists do and demand.
In the machine shop tools are subordinated and adapted to the needs of the process of production and the product, not the other way around. So must it be with the tools of thought fashioned by formal logic and dialectics. They must each find their proper place in the process of mental production and cooperate with other tools and operations to create the desired result — a correct conceptual reproduction of material reality.
Trotsky remarked in reference to the formalistic theorising of a German professor, Stammler, author of a treatise on “Economics and the Law,” which influenced certain European Socialist intellectuals much like the ideas of the philosopher Morris Cohen swayed certain American intellectuals. “It was just another of the innumerable attempts to force the great stream of natural and human history, from the amoeba to present-day man and beyond, through the closed rings of the eternal categories — rings which have reality only as imprints on the brain of a pedant.” (My Life, p. 119.)
The mental habits instilled by pedants are difficult to shake off, especially when they have been ingrained into the mind by training in bourgeois universities. To insist that dialectics provide an expression of its laws and ideas, good for all times, for all purposes, in all spheres, is to ask the impossible of dialectics. Dialectics cannot fulfil it. Any attempt to do so would violate its own inner nature and dialectics would slip back into formalism.
The laws and ideas of dialectics, however precise and finely drawn, can never be more than approximately correct. They cannot be all-embracing and eternal. It is noteworthy that such a demand is made most often and most insistently by petty-bourgeois migrants to the Marxist movement who are still enslaved to the formalism of academic life and thought. Engels has said: “A system of natural and historical knowledge which is all-embracing and final for all time is in contradiction to the fundamental laws of dialectical thinking; which, however, far from excluding, on the contrary includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make grand strides from generation to generation.” (Anti-Duhring, p. 31.)
The critics of dialectics ask disapprovingly what the student of dialectics sometimes asks anxiously: ‘Where is the authoritative treatise on dialectics?” When we direct them to the works of the outstanding Marxists — Marx, Engels, Mehring, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, etc. — they recoil in horror and cry out: “These books are not like the textbooks we are accustomed to in the schools and universities. The ideas are not tabulated, enumerated, cut and-dried. They are polemical from the first page to the last; they deal with concrete problems of one kind or another; they do not set down their laws and conclusions each with fixed rank and proper title, like officers in the army hierarchy. Here one idea is put forward as first, there another. What is a decent citizen to think about such behaviour?”
Just so, we answer. What you find in these Marxist writings is no accident. We can and we shall give all the textbooks and treatises on dialectics and its laws that you desire. Marx himself hoped, as he wrote to Engels in 1858: “If there should ever be time for such work again, I should greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer’s sheets [32 or 48 printed pages], what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism.” (Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 102.) Such a treatise would have been of inestimable use to all students of dialectics. In his works Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy and Anti-Duhring, Engels later carried out this assignment.
Even such a systematic presentation as Marx could have written would not, I believe, have satisfied the formalists. They have a thirst for formalism, for fixed and final absolute expressions, which dialectics cannot quench. According to dialectics, the truth is always concrete. That is why, for example, dialectics best exhibits itself in connection with and through the analysis of concrete questions in specific fields of experience. That is why it naturally and inevitably assumes a contradictory, that is, polemical character. It is no accident that dialectics had one of its finest literary expressions in the dialogues of Plato, which are controversial in form as well as dialectical in content. Aristotle, too, continually polemicises against the views of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Progressive and revolutionary thought in the sciences spontaneously assumes a more or less polemical character. Read Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he counterposes the Copernican to the Ptolemaic schemes of astronomy and for which he was banished. Or Bacon’s Advancement of Learning which inaugurated the new era in modern thought. “This whole volume is one long argument,” remarks Darwin in his last chapter of The Origin of Species. These world-shaking and thought-quickening works are polemical in form and dialectical in content because they had to destroy the old in order to make way for the new ideas forcing their way into social consciousness.
In his famous speech, “On the Essence of Constitutions”, reprinted in the January, 1942 Fourth International, Lassalle points out how the written constitution of a state is the juridical expression of the material constitution of the specific social structure and how it changes in accordance with shifts in the relationships of class forces. Formal definitions of constitutions cannot explain their origin, development and disappearance. For this we must go to the real class relations and class struggles in society, which necessarily underlie the constitutional forms, create, alter and destroy them.
It is no great task to draft a written constitution. This could be done and has been done in a few days. The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin in particular, wrote a constitution for the Soviet Republic in 1917 almost in passing, in obedience to the needs of the revolutionary struggle at that particular stage. The Bolsheviks were not formalists. They understood the subordinate role of all formal documents and the predominant place that must be accorded in constitutional questions, as in all others, to the living struggle and actual relationships of the forces involved.
It is the same with a written “constitution” of dialectical logic. This would reflect the state of the dialectic at a given moment and from a specific and limited point of view. Such a codification is important, necessary and useful. But is does not and cannot replace the most careful and direct attention to the material realities and conflicting forces upon which dialectics bases itself, which determine its characteristics and also the changes in its characteristics.
The true relationship between matter and the forms it assumes must be understood. They are always interdependent and arise one out of the other. But for materialist dialecticians it is the movement of matter, now expressed in natural science as mass-energy, that is decisive, not the transient or particular forms which that material movement has at any given stage and in any specific formation. Formalism is abhorrent to dialectical materialism.
In discussing this and related questions with Comrade Vincent Dunne, he pointed out how this request for a hard and fast statement of dialectics resembles requests from people new to the mass movement for rigid instructions on how to negotiate a contract, how to lead a strike, how to organise a branch and even, I suppose, “how to win friends and influence people.” Such handbooks and directives are very helpful, as everyone knows who receives a letter from the party center. But they have definite inherent limitations. They cannot substitute for a concrete appreciation of the situation, based upon an analysis of all the complex circumstances, including the given relationship of forces and the direction of their development. For the solution of any specific problem something else is needed. What is that essential ingredient?
Comrade Cannon has often expressed it in the pointed remark: “There’s no substitute for intelligence.” The highest form of intelligence is that guided by the method of the materialist dialectic. How can this Marxist intelligence be acquired? By experience within the mass movement, by study, by critical thinking, by immersion in working-class life and struggles so that the movements, moods and mind of the masses become familiar and known. It is this social movement which has given life to materialist dialectics and which continues to inspire and promote its development by wedding it to concrete reality.
During the struggle with the petty-bourgeois oppositionists, they demanded immediate and all-inclusive answers to all kinds of abstract questions. What will you do and say if this happens, if that happens? Trotsky answered these panic-stricken people: “For answers to ‘concrete’ questions, the oppositionists want recipes from a cookbook for the epoch of imperialist wars. I don’t intend to write such a cookbook. But from our principled approach to the fundamental questions we shall always be able to arrive at a correct solution for any concrete problem, complicated though it might be.” (In Defence of Marxism, p. 42.)
No one can provide you with a cookbook of the dialectics. But its main ideas can be set forth in such a fashion that the method can be understood and used for the solution of concrete problems. Engels once wrote: “From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change: on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world, development comes to an end. The concept fish includes a life in water and breathing through gills: how are you going to get from fish to amphibian without breaking through this concept? And it has been broken through and we know a whole series of fish which have developed their air bladders further into lungs and can breathe air. How, without bringing one or both concepts into conflict with reality, are you going to get from the egg-laying reptile to the mammal, which gives birth to living young? And in reality we have in the monotremata a whole sub-class of egg-laying mammals — in 1843, I saw the eggs of the duck-bill in Manchester and with arrogant narrow-mindedness mocked at such stupidity — as if a mammal could lay eggs — and now it has been proved! So do not behave to the conception of value in the way I had later to beg the duckbill’s pardon for!” (Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 530.)
The laws of dialectics are in the same boat with the law of value in political economy — and with all other laws. They have reality only as approximations, tendencies, averages. They do not and cannot immediately, directly and completely coincide with reality. If they did so, they would not be conceptual reflections of reality, but that objective reality itself. Although thought and being are interdependent, they are not identical.
With formal logic we began by stating what it is. With dialectics, on the other hand, we started by explaining what it is not. Now we propose to discuss what dialectics is, what its positive content consists of.
Hegel drew from his philosophy and his logic the premise, “All that is real is rational.” Although this proposition is rarely made explicit in conscious terms, it guides all our practice and all our theorising. We conduct ourselves in everyday life and in our work upon the basis of the fact that there are material things with stable relations around us, that there are regular occurrences in nature, that things change in accordance with definite laws — and that these things and their connections, these objectively recurring events and laws can be known and correctly, or as the academicians say, rationally, accounted for.
The same rule regarding the rationality of the real prevails in the domain of theory. Indeed theory would be impossible without its direction. All scientific investigation proceeds upon the basis that things are connected with each other in definite ways, that their changes exhibit a certain uniformity, regularity and lawfulness — and that therefore their interrelations, transitions into one another and laws of development can be ascertained and explained. There have been sceptical and religious thinkers who denied that the real world was rational. That is the prime postulate of existentialism. But even those philosophers who asserted that reality was irrational, and therefore unknowable by the mind of man, arrived at that conclusion by rational methods. Their rational method of procedure gave the lie to their irrational conclusion and remained in stark contradiction to it.
The science of logic must take as its starting point the unity of the subjective processes of thought with the processes of the external world. Nature cannot be unreasonable or reason contrary to nature. Everything that exists must have a necessary and sufficient reason for existence — and that reason can be discovered and communicated to others. This conception was formulated in 1646 by Leibnitz, the great German logician, mathematician and philosopher, as “the principle of sufficient reason” by virtue of which, he says, “we know that no fact can be found real, no proposition true, without a sufficient reason why it is as it is rather than otherwise.”
The material basis of this law lies in the actual interdependence of all things and in their reciprocal interactions. These features of the material world secure conceptual determination and logical expression in such categories as cause and effect, determinism and freedom, etc. If everything that exists has a necessary and sufficient reason for existence, that means it had to come into being. It was pushed into existence and forced its own way into existence by natural necessity. It had to struggle against all kinds of opposing forces to make room for itself in the actual world. Reality proves itself by virtue of its necessity. Reality, rationality and necessity are intimately associated at all times.
Let us consider the movement for socialism in the light of these ideas. Before Marx’s day socialism was a Utopia, an age-old dream of humanity, which could not achieve reality because the necessary material preconditions were lacking. Socialism was neither real nor necessary for humanity at that stage of its development — and was therefore irrational, a daydream, an anticipation of reality.
With the development of capitalism, socialism became for the first time a real prospect within men’s reach. Marx and Engels demonstrated this in their scientific socialism. They disclosed in theoretical form the reality, rationality and necessity of socialism and the proletarian struggle for its realisation. But this was by and large a theoretical anticipation of reality, not an immediate practical prospect. Socialism was predominantly a program and a goal, compared to the social reality of capitalism.
But with the growth of the proletarian mass movement and the expansion of socialist ideas, socialism began to acquire more and more reality, more and more necessity, more and more reasonableness. Why? Because, as Marx and Engels pointed out, ideas become forces when the masses accept them. The first great leap from ideality to reality occurred in the Bolshevik revolution of l917,which made socialism far more real than capitalism over one sixth of the earth’s surface.
Thus the reality of socialism has manifested itself by the acquisition of more and more material existence. This also proves its rationality, that is to say, its correspondence with the real and pressing needs of humanity, and especially its most progressive section, the working class. Socialism proves itself to be the rational outcome of men’s strivings to better their conditions. It becomes actual because it is rational, that is, in harmony with the trends of social progress. It is rational because it becomes more and more real, that is, an active force in the lives and struggles of humanity. Its rationality and its reality react upon and reinforce each other.
At the same time and in the same way that socialism proves its rationality and its reality, it also proves its necessity. If socialism were not necessary, if the requisite conditions for its production and reproduction on an extended basis were not present, it could not become a reality, endure for any length of time, or flourish.
A similar situation prevails in regard to the origin and evolution of species through the struggle for existence within organic nature. Species endure because they are adapted to the conditions of their environment. Species change because variations within the same species lead to the natural selection of individuals better suited to the changing environment and eventually to the creation of new species. There exists a real, reasonable and necessary relationship between the species of plants or animals and their environment, whether species come into existence, endure, change or disappear.
If everything actual is necessarily rational, this means that every item of the real world has sufficient reason for existing and must find a rational explanation. All kinds of people have gone wrong by ignoring the existence or denying the rational significance of some portion of reality. The Greeks declared that such numbers as the square root of 2 were “irrational,” and therefore were not numbers and not worthy of attention. Yet the study and development of such “irrational” numbers have given birth to a fruitful branch of mathematics.
The Greek philosophers depreciated in principle the value of practice as an element of knowledge. We, on the other hand, place practice at the foundation of real knowledge.
Until Freud psychologists dismissed dreams, acts of forgetfulness, slips of the tongue as trivial and meaningless mental phenomena. Freud has shown how they disclose the veiled operations of unconscious thought.
Just as modern oil refineries have recovered by products from distillation and cracking more valuable than the original petroleum, so out of the junk heaps of history priceless treasures have been recovered by more penetrating processes of thought and work. The materialist conception of history, for example, based itself, as Engels remarked, upon “the simple fact, previously hidden under ideological growths, that human beings must first of all eat, drink, shelter and clothe themselves before they can turn their attention to politics, science, art and religion . . .”
The most terrible events of our epoch, economic crises, imperialist and civil wars, fascism, seem irrational, incredible, unnecessary to the philistine mentalities of petty-bourgeois democrats. Yet they are not only real but necessary — and thereby find a rational explanation. They are the most important and decisive processes in contemporary life. They express the inner nature and convulsive movements of capitalism in its death agony. They are rational manifestations of a highly irrational system of social relations.
Moreover, what appears rational and necessary to the members of one class (for workers, higher wages in view of excessive taxes and the soaring costs of living) appears no less unreasonable and unnecessary to the opposite class (the employers whose profits will be cut). What is rational from one social standpoint appears to be the height of folly from the other. Yet this apparent irrationality finds its real and its rational explanation in the contradictory interests of the two classes engaged in struggle over the division of the national income.
To the petty-bourgeois liberals our movement, too, appears unreal, too insignificant for them to take seriously or for powerful governments to prosecute us. They “defend” us on such grounds. But we loom as significant forces to Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, because of our reality, because of the social and political power latent in our ideas. Thus their seemingly irrational persecution of the Trotskyists can be rationally explained. And we shall become more and more significant as the revolutionary impulses of the workers and colonial peoples obtain more powerful expression.
Why has our party and our international movement come into existence? What has drawn such different individuals in so many countries into a tight political bond and disciplined unity? We have been born and continue to grow stronger because our existence is a rational necessity under present social conditions. The Trotskyist movement is no accident, no trivial force. Our movement has been created to meet the need of the working class for revolutionary leadership. We derive our political reality and our political rationality from that political necessity.
That is also why we take our method and our ideas so seriously. The principles and traditions upon which the selection of our cadres has taken place are not unimportant but vital to our existence. That’s also why we take ideas as a whole so very seriously, because for us they are literally a matter of political life and death. And we have engaged in many life-and-death battles against powerful and disguised adversaries to protect, preserve and disseminate them.
We are the most rational of all political movements because we are, in the historical sense, the most real and the most necessary. We have to be rational in order to become real. That’s also why we can put so much life into our logic and so much logic into our life. The two are for us inseparable.
People have come up to me and said: “You make logic so lively.” That is no personal merit on my part. Our logic, the materialist dialectics, is itself the logic of life. It brims over with movement, with vitality, with force. The logic of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois professors is deadening to study and to teach because it is the logic of a static universe and of dead things. Their logic has less and less connection with the current realities of social and scientific life. It belongs to the dying past, not to the living present and the creative future. Indeed, a formalised logic has become so useless, so sterile, that its professors go so far as to make a virtue out of necessity and say, like Burnham, that logic itself has little or no practical use or application to the real world. This is a confession of theoretical bankruptcy.
Thus reality, rationality, and necessity go hand in hand.
This proposition seems to justify everything that exists, good, bad and indifferent. In one sense it does precisely that — and properly so. For everything that exists stands in need of theoretical justification because the very fact of its actuality gives it a valid claim upon rationality, reality and necessity.
The conservatives and reactionaries who lean upon Hegel see only this side of his doctrines: its justification for what exists. This is the conservative side of Hegel’s thought and also, if you choose, of the dialectical method in general. It constitutes an indispensable element of all dialectics, including the materialist. For things do exist and endure for a definite time. Moreover, everything that ever existed is to some degree conserved as well as destroyed by what comes out of it and after it. The past serves as the raw material for the new generations to work upon and in this way to prepare the future.
But this is not the ultimate truth of our knowledge about reality. It is only the beginning of wisdom. What the other side of reality and its dialectic consists of will be the theme of the next lecture.