George Novack
An Introduction to the Logic Of Marxism: LECTURE VI
In the last lecture we considered the meaning of Hegel's two propositions: that the truth is concrete, and further that all that is real is rational. We found that everything comes into existence and remains there, not by accident, but as the result of determinate conditions and necessary causes. There are threads of lawfulness running through the processes of reality and exhibited in the existence and persistence of its products. There is reason in the real world — and therefore the real world is rationally reflected and translated in our mind.
In this discussion we want to examine what appears to be the other side of this proposition but which, as we shall see, is an inseparable aspect of reality. Let us turn our previous affirmation around on its axis and view its negative aspect.
We have already seen what great measure of truth there is in the proposition that the real is rational. We have ascertained that all things come into existence and endure in a lawful and necessary way. But this is not the whole and final truth about things. It is one-sided, relative, and a passing truth. The real truth about things is that they not only exist, persist, but they also develop and pass away. This passing away of things, eventuating in death, is expressed in logical terminology by the term “negation.”
The whole truth about things can be expressed only if we take into account this opposite and negative aspect. In other words, unless we introduce the negation of our first affirmation, we shall obtain only a superficial and abstract inspection of reality.
All things are limited and changing. They not only force their way and are forced into existence and maintain themselves there. They also develop, disintegrate and are pushed out of existence and eventually disappear. In logical terms, they not only affirm themselves. They likewise negate themselves and are negated by other things. By coming into existence, they say: “Yes! Here I am!” to reality and to thought engaged in understanding reality. By developing and eventually going out of existence, they say on the contrary: “No, I no longer am; I cannot stay real.” If everything that comes into existence must pass out of existence, as all of reality pounds constantly into our brains, then every affirmation must inexorably express its negation in logical thought. Such a movement of things and of thought is called a dialectical movement.
“All things . . . meet their doom; and in saying so, we have a perception that Dialectic is the universal and irresistible power, before which nothing can stay, however secure and stable it may deem itself,” writes Hegel. (Shorter Logic, p. 128.)
There is a fable in The Arabian Nights about an Oriental monarch who, early in life, asked his wise men for the sum and substance of all learning, for the truth that would apply to everything at all times and under all conditions, a truth which would be as absolutely sovereign as he thought himself to be. Finally, over the king's deathbed, his wise men supplied the following answer: “Oh, mighty king, this one truth will always apply to all things: ‘And this too shall pass away’.” If justice prevailed, the king should have bequeathed a rich reward to his wise men, for they had disclosed to him the secret of the dialectic. This is the power, the omnipotence of the negative side of existence, which is forever emerging from, annihilating and transcending the affirmative aspect of things.
This “powerful unrest,” as Leibnitz called it, this quickening force and destructive action of life — the negative — is everywhere at work: in the movement of things, in the growth of living beings, in the transformations of substances, in the evolution of society, and in the human mind which reflects all these objective processes.
From this dialectical essence of reality Hegel drew the conclusion that constitutes an indispensable part of his famous aphorism: All that is rational is real. But for Hegel all that is real is not without exception and qualification worthy of existence. “ Existence is in part mere appearance, and only in part reality.” (Introduction to the Shorter Logic, § 6.) Existence elementally and necessarily divides itself, and the investigating mind finds it to be so divided, into opposing aspects of appearance and essence. This disjunction between appearance and essence is no more mysterious than the disjunction between the inside and outside of an object.
What distinguishes essence or essential reality from mere appearance? A thing is truly real if it is necessary, if its appearance truly corresponds to its essence, and only so long as it proves itself to be necessary. Hegel, being the most consistent idealist, sought the source of this necessity in the movement of the universal mind, in the Absolute Idea. Materialists, on the other hand, locate the roots of necessity in the objective world, in the material conditions and conflicting forces which create, sustain and destroy all things. But, from the purely logical standpoint, both schools of philosophy agree in connecting reality with necessity.
Something acquires reality because the necessary conditions for its production and reproduction are objectively present and operative. It becomes more or less real in accordance with the changes in the external and internal circumstances of its development. It remains truly real only so long and insofar as it is necessary under the given conditions. Then, as conditions change, it loses its necessity and its reality and dissolves into mere appearance.
Let us consider a few illustrations of this process, this contradiction between essence and appearance, resulting from the different forms assumed by matter in its motion. In the production of the plant, seed, bud, flower and fruit are all equally necessary phases or forms of its existence. Taken separately, each by itself, they are all equally real, equally necessary, equally rational phases of the plant’s development.
Yet each in turn becomes supplanted by the other and thereby becomes no less unnecessary and non-real. Each phase of the plant’s manifestation appears as a reality and then is transformed in the course of development into an unreality or an appearance. This movement, triadic in this particular case, from unreality into reality and then back again to unreality, constitutes the essence, the inner movement behind all appearance. Appearance cannot be understood without an understanding of this process. It is this that determines whether any appearance in nature, society or in the mind is rational or non-rational.
Writes Engels: “The Roman Republic was real, but so was the Roman Empire which superseded it. In 1789 the French monarchy had become so unreal, that is to say, it had been so robbed of all necessity, so non-rational, that it had to be destroyed by the Great [French] Revolution — of which Hegel always speaks with the greatest enthusiasm. In this case the monarchy was the unreal and the revolution was the real. And so, in the course of development, all that was previously real becomes unreal, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its rationality.
Capitalism was once a real and necessary social system. It had to come into being by virtue of the prevailing social conditions and the growth of man’s productive forces. It did come into existence and proceeded to spread throughout the world, overthrowing, subordinating to itself, or supplanting all earlier social relations in its triumphal march. Capitalism therewith proved its necessity, its inevitability in historical practice, by establishing its reality and rationality and exerting its power in society.
There is a measure of truth in the assertion that so horrifies the philistines, “Might makes right.” But the philistine, lacking dialectics, doesn’t understand that the contrary of this proposition holds equally true. “Right makes might.” Today capitalism has come to the end of its rope and is more than ready for hanging. This antiquated system of production is no less unnecessary, unreal, irrational in the twentieth century as it was just the opposite from its rise in the fifteenth century and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has to be abolished or negated if mankind is to live and progress. It will be negated the world over by a social force within capitalism itself which is far more real and powerful, far more necessary and rational than imperialist capitalism: the socialist proletariat and its allies, the colonial oppressed.
The working class has historical reason and therefore historical right on its side. This will prove more effective in the struggle of the contending classes than all the might possessed right now by capitalist reaction or the might accumulated from the past by it. That this reason and this right can become mighty enough to overturn capitalism has been already demonstrated in practice by the October revolution of 1917. This negation of capitalist power was the strongest possible affirmation of the social and political right of the industrial workers to rule and to reconstruct the social order.
Thus we see that negation is not something barren or self-destroying. It is also its own opposite. It is the most positive and powerful of affirmations. Just as affirmation transforms itself of necessity into negation, so in turn negation exhibits its positive character, as the negation of the negation, that is, an entirely new affirmation which, in its turn, contains the seed of its own negation. This is the dialectic of development, the necessary transformation of processes into other processes.
In the formative stage of the Trotskyist movement, it was necessary and correct that we should strive to remain attached to the degenerating Third International, try to reform its backsliding course, and win over the masses of revolutionary workers in its sections to the Bolshevik program of Lenin. After the surrender to Hitlerism in Germany in 1933 took place without serious repercussions in the ranks, it became evident that the process of degeneration had reached the point of death. Quantitative changes had brought about a new quality. The Third International was beyond cure — it was dead. It had become, like the Second International, a “stinking corpse.” It was buried by Stalin in 1943.
Our former policy in relation to the Comintern thereby became unnecessary, incorrect, outworn, unrealistic. The new stage of development demanded a new policy and a new course adjusted to new conditions. The Trotskyists had to break all ties with the Stalinised Third International and start building a new and completely independent Fourth International. We turned from the reform of the Third International to its replacement by a genuine revolutionary international organisation of the working class.
Some people saw — and indeed still see — an insoluble contradiction in this sequence of events. “How can you be for reforming the Comintern at one time and then favour its overthrow at another?” they expostulated. They were formalistic to the point of pedantry and not dialectical in their thinking as well as in their political activity. They do not understand that it is necessary and rational to change policy and strategy with changes in objective reality. They do not comprehend that different and even contradictory policies can and do serve to promote one and the same strategic aim. In logical terms they do not grasp how what is different in appearance can remain identical in essence; or, to put it more generally, that what may seem different can yet be identical. They reason according to the law of identity in formal logic: What is identical must always remain the same both in appearance and essence regardless of circumstances. But dialectics teaches that what is identical not only may but must change.
This same problem has arisen at each new stage in the development of our movement. Each turn in our political tactics, necessitated by the changing conditions of the radical labor movement, has witnessed a struggle between formalists and dialecticians. In the 1934 merger with the American Workers Party, the Oehlerite sectarians, in reality opposed to the fusion, wanted to lay down formal stipulations and barriers to the Musteite centrists which would have resulted in preventing this fruitful marriage of two different political groups. Unable to reconcile their formalism with the necessities of building a revolutionary party in this country, they drove toward a split.
The proposal to enter the Socialist Party in 1935 encountered opposition from formalists who wanted to maintain the previous form of party organisation, regardless of the pressing political needs of the process of building the proletarian party. They thought our party had attained a finished organisational structure when it was actually just at the beginning of party building. The exit from the Socialist Party in its turn encountered opposition from other formalists who had begun to accommodate themselves to cohabitation with the centrist milieu, although political necessity dictated that the struggle with centrism be carried through to the end. It may be not unimportant to recall that some of the same individuals who opposed our entry into the Socialist Party were most reluctant to leave it (Martin Abern). The more things change, the more formalism remains true to itself — and thereby is false to reality.
All these different actions, which appeared so absolutely contradictory and therefore incomprehensible to the formalists and sectarians, were equally necessary and rational stages in the dialectical process of assembling our forces. Tactical formulas, like all formulas, must adapt themselves to the changing course, the flux of real events.
We could cite many other instances of such dialectical shifts in our party history: the turn to the transitional program, our change in attitude toward the formation of a Labor Party, etc. All these confirm in their fashion the dialectical truth that all real development proceeds in a contradictory manner by reason of the conflict of opposing forces within and around all existing things. Nothing is unalterably fixed and absolutely final. Everything passes away in the course of development. Necessity becomes transformed into lack of necessity, or contingency and chance; reality becomes transformed into unreality or appearance; rationality becomes irrationality; yesterday’s truth becomes today’s half-truth and tomorrow’s error, and, finally, utter falsehood.
Hegel generalised this fundamental feature of reality in his logical law that everything necessarily, naturally and reasonably turns into its opposite during the course of its existence. According to the laws of formal logic, this is impossible, illogical, absurd, because it is self-contradictory. In formal logic contradiction and especially self-contradiction are impossible in reality as well as illegitimate in thought.
By introducing the dialectic, Hegel turned this basic law of formal logic inside out and upside down and thereby revolutionised the science of logic. Instead of eliminating contradiction from reality and logic, Hegel made it the keystone of his conception of reality and his system of logic. Hegel’s entire logical structure proceeds from the proposition of the identity, unity and interpenetration of opposites. A thing is not only itself but another. A is not merely equal to A; it is also more profoundly equal to non-A.
If, as we have stated, it was Aristotle’s great and profound achievement to have fully appreciated the profound discovery of his predecessors in Greece that A equals A and to have made this law of identity the basis for a systematic exposition of the science of logic, it was no less epoch-making to systematise the discovery, as Hegel did, that A not only equals A but also equals non-A. Hegel made this law of the identity, unity and interpenetration of opposites the basis of his dialectical system of logic.
This law of the unity of opposites, which so perplexes and horrifies addicts of formal logic, can be easily understood, not only when it is applied to actual processes of development and interrelations of events, but also when it is contrasted with the formal law of identity. It is logically true that A equals A; that John is John; and that five plus one equals six. But it is far more profoundly true that A is also non-A. John is not simply John: John is a man. This correct proposition is not an affirmation of abstract identity but an identification of opposites. The logical category or material class, mankind, with which John is one and the same is far more and other than John, the individual. Mankind is at the same time identical with, yet different from, John.
Formal logic had no more use for opposition, let alone contradiction, than the American Indians had for petroleum or the totalitarians have for democracy. They either ignored it or threw it on the junk heap. Hegel retrieved this jewel, cut and polished its facets and thus made a world-historic contribution to logic. He demonstrated that opposition and contradiction, instead of being meaningless or valueless, were the most important factors in nature, society and thought. Only by fully grasping this can one grasp the impulse, the motive force in reality, in life — and for this reason Hegel made it the foundation of his logic.
Consider, for example, the two propositions we have been analysing. The second, “All that is rational is real,” does assert the opposite of the first and, in fact, contradicts it: All that is real is rational. Hegel was not at all bothered by this contradiction. On the contrary, as a dialectician, he seized upon this contradiction as a clue to the essence or gist of reality. He understood that it was a genuine contradiction and accepted it and operated with it, because both opposition and contradiction are genuinely real and rational. This particular contradiction expresses the inherent nature of things and arises from the contradictory character of reality itself.
The formal logician lays down his law of identity in the same manner that the absolute monarch lays down the law to his subjects. This is the law; don’t dare violate it. Just as the subjects keep rebelling against political absolutism, so the forces of reality keep upsetting and violating the laws of formal logic. Processes in nature are forever contradicting themselves as they develop. The bud negates the seed, the blossom negates the bud, the fruit the blossom. The same is true in society. Capitalism negates feudalism; socialism, capitalism. “Contradiction, above all things, is what moves the world: and it is ridiculous to say that contradiction is unthinkable. The correct point in that statement is that contradiction is not the end of the matter but cancels itself.” (Shorter Logic § 119)
The blossom that negates the bud becomes itself negated by the fruit. Capitalism which overthrows feudalism becomes itself overthrown by socialism. This process is known in logic as the law of the negation of the negation.
In this dialectical movement, in this passage out of and into opposition, resides the secret to the movement of all real things. Therefore here also is the mainspring of the dialectical method of logic, which is a correct conceptual translation of the processes of development in reality. Dialectics is the logic of matter in motion and thereby the logic of contradictions, because development is inherently self-contradictory. Everything generates within itself that force which leads to its negation, its passing away into some other and higher form of being.
’Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there dialectic is at work. It is also the soul of all knowledge which is truly scientific. In the popular way of looking at things, the refusal to abide by any one abstract form of the understanding is considered only justice. As the proverb has it: Live and let live. Each must have its turn; we admit the one, but we admit the other also.
This dialectical activity is universal. There is no escape from its unremitting and relentless embrace. “ Dialectics gives expression to a law which is felt in all grades of consciousness and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of dialectic. We are aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible and ultimate, is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by the dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being, and to turn suddenly into its opposite.” (Shorter Logic § 81)
The civilian is the opposite of the soldier. Yet conscription teaches many a civilian that his status as a civilian is not “inflexible and ultimate but changeable and transient” and that he is forced to surrender his own immediate and conventional being and to turn suddenly into his opposite. He may not know that this is a commonplace dialectical transformation, any more than he may know that the war itself is imperialist in character, but the ignorance of the individual does not alter the dialectical character of the process.
This dialectic is the revolutionary side of Hegel’s doctrine.
“But precisely here lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy . . . that it once and for all dealt the deathblow to the finality of all products of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, became in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which once discovered had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further and where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and admire the absolute truth to which it had attained.
“And what holds good for the realm of philosophic knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical affairs. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a perfected termination in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect ‘state,’ are things which can exist only in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical situations are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher.
“Each stage is necessary, therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the newer and higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, each loses its validity and justification. It must give way to a higher form which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition and the world market dissolves in practice all stable, time-honoured institutions, so this dialectical world outlook dissolves all conceptions of final absolute truth and of a final absolute state of humanity corresponding to it. For it, nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher.
“And the dialectical world-outlook itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side: it recognises that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only within certain limits. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute it admits.” (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy I)