George Novack
An Introduction to the Logic Of Marxism: LECTURE VII
In the Introduction to his Logic, Hegel wrote: “I could not of course imagine that the method which in this system of Logic I have followed — or rather which this system follows of itself — is not capable of much improvement, of much elaboration in detail, but at the same time I know that it is the only true method.” (p. 65.)
Hegel could not, naturally, anticipate how great a transformation his dialectical method was to undergo at the hands of his socialist successors, Marx and Engels. These revolutionary thinkers did not limit themselves to “improving” or “elaborating in detail” Hegel’s dialectics, any more than they stopped short at introducing only amendments to the theories of classical bourgeois economy or to the political system of bourgeois democracy. In the course of their critical work, Marx and Engels passed beyond idealist dialectics and revolutionised it by creating an entirely new instrument of logic: the materialist dialectics. As Aristotle synthesised the major conquests of Greek thought, and Hegel those of the German philosophers, so we find the highest synthesis of both these schools of philosophy in the work of Marx and Engels.
Hegel had revolutionised the old formal logic and reconstructed it on new theoretical foundations. Marx and Engels lifted this revolution in the science of logic to a still higher level by separating the rational substance within Hegel’s thought from its irrational idealist shell and placing dialectics upon a solid materialist basis. They made dialectics materialist and materialism dialectical. This twofold transmutation was an epoch making event in the history of thought.
Marx and Engels treated Hegelian dialectics much as they did the ideas of their socialist forerunners. Just as they cast aside the false Utopian and idealist sides of Saint-Simon’s, Fourier’s and Owen’s social criticism and incorporated their socialist doctrines and outlook into a consistently materialist framework, so they divorced Hegel’s dialectics from its mystical idealist shell and absorbed its valid content and vital ideas into their new world outlook.
Thus modern dialectics has itself passed through a dialectical development. From the one-sided, distorted shape which it first assumed in Hegel’s philosophy, dialectics became transformed into its opposite in the materialist system of Marxism. The Hegelian idealist and the Marxist materialist are the two polar types of modern dialectical logic. The first is the false and fetishistic expression of dialectics; the second is its true revolutionary form.
Just as Russia experienced a twofold revolutionary process in 1917, passing through both a bourgeois democratic and a proletarian revolution, so the science of logic in the first half of the nineteenth century underwent a double revolution as it emerged from the creative minds of the great German bourgeois philosophers and then passed through the criticism of the founders of scientific socialism. In a certain sense this is one of the most striking examples of combined development in the history of human thought.
Marx and Engels pointed out that their doctrines arose out of a critical reconstruction of German classical philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy.
“Without German philosophy, particularly that of Hegel,” Engels wrote, “German scientific socialism (the only scientific socialism extant) would never have come into existence.” That is one reason why we hold this philosophy in such esteem and are obliged to study and to master it.
Marx and Engels had two chief immediate predecessors in philosophy: one was Hegel, the foremost representative of the idealist school in Germany; the other was Feuerbach, the head of the materialist tendency. These two thinkers provided Marx and Engels with the essential ingredients for the construction of their own world-view. Marx and Engels adopted a critical attitude toward the ideas they received from their teachers. They not only retained certain elements of their thought; they also transmuted others, while at the same time they rejected leading ideas of each. It is important to know precisely what these were in both cases.
Marx and Engels, like many of the brilliant university youth of their day in Germany, began their intellectual careers as disciples of Hegel. Hegel’s thought, as we have noted, suffered from an acute contradiction: its essentially revolutionary dialectics was amalgamated with a reactionary idealism which disguised and distorted its real character and from which it clamoured to be set free.
The Hegelian school, which after Hegel’s death dominated advanced German thinking in the thirties and forties of a century ago, broke up into two opposing trends emanating from and corresponding to these antagonistic sides of Hegel’s thought. The so-called Old Hegelians clung fast to the more reactionary aspects of his system, drawing the most conservative conclusions in various fields. The Young Hegelians of the Left, on the other hand, emphasised and developed the more radical implications of Hegel’s ideas along the lines of his dialectical method. This led them, under the impulse of the developing bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement, first to a criticism of religion, then of society and of the state, and finally on to anarchist, socialist and communist ideas.
Marx and Engels, who stood at the extreme left of the Young Hegelians and never actually identified themselves with the so-called Left Hegelians, soon came in collision with the mistaken ideas and conclusions of all its leading figures (Bauer, Hess, Stirner, etc.) and evolved a new standpoint of their own. The steps in their emancipation from Hegelian and all other forms of idealism on the one hand, as well as from one-sided materialism on the other, are clearly delineated in their writings of the eighteen-forties. They wrote a remarkable series of critical works, among them The Holy Family and The German Ideology, in which they settled accounts with their philosophical predecessors and rivals. In these writings we can trace with unusual clarity and definiteness the successive stages in the evolution of the logic of Marxism. This record is far clearer and more concrete than the genesis of any other school of thought. Just as socialism is being brought into existence far more consciously than any previous social system, so the theory of socialism has been created far more consciously than any earlier philosophy.
The philosophical progress of Marx and Engels was made possible and accelerated by Feuerbach’s materialist criticism of Hegel. Feuerbach is the bridge over which Marx and Engels crossed in their evolution from Hegelian idealism to dialectical materialism. Feuerbach is the catalytic agent which engendered and then speeded the precipitation of dialectical materialism from the contact of Marx and Engels with Hegelianism.
From Hegel, Marx and Engels derived their logical method. From Feuerbach they received a materialist criticism of Hegel and a reaffirmation of the fundamental position of materialism which had fallen into degradation and disfavour in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe. Hegel had brought the idealist speculations of the German school, beginning with Kant and continuing through Fichte and Schelling, to their ultimate expression. His orthodox epigones had pushed them to the point of absurdity and sterility.
Feuerbach exposed the unreality and errors of Hegel’s speculative excesses from a materialist point of view. He replaced the fetishistic speculations of the Hegelians with the sober truth of materialism. Thanks to Feuerbach, whose writings aroused their enthusiasm, Marx and Engels were helped to liberate their minds from the idealism with which Hegel’s thought was supersaturated.
But Marx and Engels could no more restate Feuerbach’s standpoint than they could at Hegel’s. Feuerbach’s thought, they pointed out, had two serious errors. It was non-dialectical and it was incompletely materialist. Feuerbach mistakenly rejected Hegel’s dialectical logic along with Hegel’s idealist aberrations. Just as the great idealists, in their over-anxiety to do justice to the processes and products of thought, suppressed the truth of materialism, so this materialist thinker slighted the achievements of the great idealists in the science of logic.
Contemporary anti-dialecticians repeat Feuerbach’s mistake with regard to Hegel — but with far less excuse and incomparably less progressive effect. Their rejection or indifference to dialectics leads backward to obsolete pre-Hegelian ideas and methods, Feuerbach’s led forward to Marxism.
Secondly, Feuerbach was a materialist in his general outlook — but not in the specific application of materialism to history and society. In this field he had not purged his thought of all vestiges of idealism. “As far as Feuerbach is a materialist, he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist,” remark Marx and Engels in their German Ideology, p. 38. He believed, for example, that love was the cement and the motive force of human society.
Marx and Engels detected these deficiencies in Feuerbach’s materialism and overcame them. They became historical materialists of the most profound and consistent kind precisely because they retained and applied the dialectical method Feuerbach had tossed aside. For dialectics is the logic of evolution and revolution, that is, of slow and gradual molecular processes, which at a certain stage produce a leap into a new molar quality. Feuerbach’s materialism was more akin to the mechanical and metaphysical materialism of the seventeenth-century English and the eighteenth-century French materialists than to dialectical materialism.
Hegel himself did not — and could not — draw all the necessary conclusions from his revolutionary method of thought. Serious limitations in his understanding and in the application of the dialectical logic he had systematised marred his work and prevented him from developing to the full its real and rich content. Hegel broke the ground and sowed the seeds for the renovation of logic and gathered the first harvest: the first and thus far the only systematic exposition of the laws of the dialectic. Marx and Engels continued the cultivation and harvested the second and richer crop — the structure of dialectical materialism.
Hegel erred in the first place by constructing a completed and closed system of philosophy in which the entire flux of reality was once and for all to be channelled and beyond which it could not pass. This vain attempt to construct a totally definitive system, inherited from the metaphysicians of the past, contradicted the key conception of Hegel’s dialectics that everything is limited, perishable and bound to pass into its opposite. Hegel’s thought was smitten by this inherent and incurable opposition between its claim to be a system of absolute truth and its dialectical method, which asserted that all truths were relative. Thus it was, said Engels, that “the revolutionary side becomes smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side.” (Feuerbach I)
Moreover, Hegel’s system was an idealist one. It tended to disguise and distort the essentially revolutionary character of the dialectic embedded within it. Indeed, Hegel drove idealism to its most consistent and extreme expression. He believed that ideas constituted the essence of all reality and that it was the development of ideas that urged the rest of reality forward. He reduced all processes in nature to the single process of the Absolute Idea. The historical process of evolution in nature, society and the mind was at bottom a reflection and replica of the evolution of men’s ideas. “Spirit ... is the cause of the world,” remarks Hegel in the Introduction to his Encyclopedia, p. 21.
External reality was no more than an imperfect copy of the unfolding of thought as it progressed toward perfection in the Absolute Idea, which is Hegel’s pseudonym for God. Hegel’s idea of history was the history of the realisation of this Absolute Idea. As Trotsky phrased it: “Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.” (In Defence of Marxism, p. 51. )
In Hegel’s idealist version of the historical process, there was in the last analysis no genuine development from the old to the new, but rather a circular movement from the original pre-existing abstract idea through nature and society to its ultimate fulfilment in the “concrete” Absolute Idea. Owing to the retarded state of scientific knowledge in his day, nature itself for Hegel experienced no fundamental historical development but remained more or less the same. The evolution of society, too, stopped short for Hegel with its capitalist mode. He had an exclusively bourgeois horizon. In politics, in his old age, he could not visualise a more perfect state than a constitutional monarchy. (His model here was the firstborn of capitalism — Britain.) Finally, he held that human thought had attained the apex of its development in his own system of Absolute Idealism.
But all these errors in Hegel’s thought, which betrayed him into wrong and conservative conclusions in a number of practical and theoretical directions, do not detract from the worth of his logical discoveries or the riches contained in his writings. Just as shadows reflect the figure and movement of real bodies, so Hegel’s absolute idealist philosophy reflected the many-sided concrete content of history and the development of scientific thought.
Marx and Engels never failed to acknowledge the historical significance and enduring achievements of the philosophic titans, and their indebtedness to Hegel and Feuerbach, from whom they took their departure. The Hegelian system, wrote Engels, covers “an incomparably greater domain than any earlier system” and develops “a wealth of thought which is astounding even today ... And as he [Hegel] was not only a creative genius but also a man of encyclopedic erudition, he played an epoch-making role in every sphere.” (Feuerbach I)
Feuerbach’s rupture with Hegel’s idealism and his return to materialism they recognised as the decisive intellectual influence in liberating themselves from the spell of idealist philosophy. But neither Feuerbach nor any other of their contemporaries had made a thorough criticism of Hegel’s ideas. Feuerbach had simply set aside Hegel’s idealist standpoint in favour of materialism without recognising the decisive importance of the dialectical method. The progress of philosophy required, however, not only a materialist but also a dialectical criticism of and development beyond Hegelian philosophy. This genuinely dialectical-and materialist criticism of Hegelianism was given by Marx and Engels in their philosophical works. And by them alone.
Together with Feuerbach, Marx and Engels totally repudiated Hegel’s idealism. They opposed an uncompromising materialism to Hegel’s equally thoroughgoing idealism. “ That means it was resolved to comprehend the real world — nature and history — just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist fancies. It was decided relentlessly to sacrifice every idealist fancy which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic connection. And materialism means nothing more than this. But here the materialistic world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and carried through consistently — at least in its basic features — in all domains of knowledge concerned.” (Feuerbach IV)
This also meant that dialectics, which, according to Hegel, was essentially “the self-development of the concept,” had to be detached from its false idealist form and placed upon correct materialist foundations. Hegel had reversed the real relations between ideas and things. He maintained that real things were but imperfect realisations of the Absolute Idea and its manifestations. Marx and Engels pointed out that the true state of affairs was the exact opposite. “We comprehended the concepts in our heads once more materialistically — as images of real things instead of regarding the real things as images of this or that stage of development of the Absolute Idea.” (Feuerbach IV)
Thanks to this materialist reversal, dialectics itself became transformed into its opposite. “Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion — both of the external world and of human thought — two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression insofar as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of apparent accidents. Thereby the dialectic of the concept itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing before, and placed upon its feet again.” (Feuerbach IV)
We can see from these facts and quotations how utterly false and foolish are the accusations made by Eastman, Hook, Edmund Wilson, and others that Marx and Engels were concealed imitators of Hegelian idealism. In reality Marx and Engels were infinitely more rigorous, well-informed, and consistent adversaries of Hegelian idealism
than these opponents of scientific socialism and its method. And they were also far more uncompromising materialists, who would have scornfully laughed at Eastman’s “common sense” and Wilson’s moralising politics as fit for the nursery but not for the arena of adult controversy. Read the philosophical works of the young Marx and Engels, while they were engaged in working out their world-view, together with the ripe observations of their later years, and you will find a criticism of idealism and an exposition of materialism which have never been surpassed.
But Marx and Engels combed the productions of their predecessors like dialectical materialists, picking out and preserving whatever was of value. Unlike the shallow snobs who see nothing but useless nonsense in Hegel, they saw that Hegel’s thought contained seeds capable of further development; that intermingled with the inevitable superstitions, prejudices and errors was a true, enduring, revolutionary element worthy of preservation and capable of further development. This was Hegel’s dialectics.
Despite the fundamental opposition between the materialist standpoint of Marxism and the idealism of Hegel, these two schools of thought have one extremely important element in common: their logical method. The dialectical method and its laws were the principal features of Hegel’s thought which Marx retained and developed. This logical bond unites them, despite all their other and decisive differences.
This affinity and this antagonism to Hegel’s work has been set forth in the most authoritative manner by Marx himself in the preface to the second edition of Capital. “My own dialectical method is not only fundamentally different from the Hegelian dialectical method, but is its direct opposite. For Hegel, the thought process (which he actually transforms into an independent subject, giving to it the name of “idea”) is the creator of the real; and for him the real is only the outward manifestation of the idea. In my view, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing other than the material when it has been transposed and translated inside the human head . . .
“Although in Hegel’s hands dialectic underwent a mystification, this does not obviate the fact that he was the first to expound the general forms of its movement in a comprehensive and fully conscious way. In Hegel’s writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within its mystical shell.”
Notice that Marx and Engels unambiguously assert that dialectics arises out of and applies to the processes of nature. Marx and I, says Engels, “were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from German philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and history.” Those revisionists who claim that dialectics does not apply to nature but only to society or to the mind contradict the plain words of Marx and Engels. They are either ignorant or wilful deceivers.
It takes dialectics to understand the historical evolution of dialectical materialism. As we indicated, Hegelianism and Marxism possess certain common features, but these are less decisive than their fundamental opposition. The Soviet government under Stalin had many political characteristics in common with fascist totalitarianism. This led many superficial thinkers to identify the two. But they are basically different and antagonistic, as the Soviet-Nazi war demonstrated in reality. In the same way petty-bourgeois revisionists seek to identify Stalinism with Bolshevism because the former is historically interconnected with the latter and has certain superficial features in common with its revolutionary opposite.
Those critics who identify Marxism with Hegelianism not only lack dialectics; they even violate the rules of formal logic. Two things having certain characteristics in common are not necessarily the same, even according to the reasoning of formal logic. The fact that the goose is an animal doesn’t mean that all animals are geese. The fact that Marxism derives historically from Hegel and that Marxism and Hegelianism use the dialectical method does not prove that they are essentially the same. It is precisely through this kind of false reasoning that Eastman and Wilson seek to classify Marxism as a branch of Hegelianism and idealism. Astronomy came out of astrology and chemistry out of alchemy. Are these sciences, therefore, to be considered identical with their prescientific forerunners?
Marx’s materialist dialectics issued out of Hegelianism just as astronomy came out of astrology and chemistry out of alchemy, not as a duplication of it, but as its opposite, its revolutionary negation. From one standpoint — the standpoint of pure logical development — they constitute a unity. But they are a unity of opposites. In the course of its historical development, modern logic has already assumed two different and contradictory forms: first, the idealist dialectics of Hegel, and second, the materialist dialectics of Marxism.
Confronted with the two opposing philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach, Marx and Engels exposed the shortcomings of each, at the same time explaining their historical necessity. They then proceeded to combine the valid ideas of both thinkers into a new system of thought. The rejection of the limitations and errors of both their idealist teachers and their materialist precursors was followed by the merger of their opposing conceptions into a unity on a new and higher basis. Such is the real dialectical derivation of dialectical materialism itself.
To achieve their unification of the dialectic method with the materialist standpoint, Marx and Engels had to bring together these two separate movements which had hitherto existed in absolute antagonism to each other. On the one hand, they had to sunder dialectics from the idealism which had brought it into being and with which it had become exclusively identified. On the other hand, they had to dissolve the connections between materialism and the mechanical and metaphysical forms with which it too had previously been exclusively bound.
Idealist dialectics gave a more correct delineation of the forms of the thought process. Materialism had correctly insisted upon the primacy of the material content of objective reality. Dialectical materialism combined the essential truths of these two branches of thought into a new and higher system of philosophy.
Thus Marx and Engels created their method of thought by radically transforming both Feuerbach’s and Hegel’s thought. Hegelianism, that supreme negation of materialism, begot its own negation in dialectical materialism. Feuerbach’ s half-hearted materialism, which absolutely opposed itself to German idealism, also begot its negation in dialectical materialism. This movement of two opposing trends of thought into their dissolution and then their resolution into a new synthesis was genuinely dialectical. Thus the evolution of dialectical materialism provides proof of the truth of its own ideas.
It is sometimes asked: Is dialectics the highest possible form of thought? Will logic assume new forms in the future? The materialist dialectic is the highest actual form of scientific thought known or available to us. Our present task is to develop that system of thought, to disseminate its ideas, in other words, to socialise dialectics which Engels defined as “our best working tool and our sharpest weapon.” (Feuerbach IV)
This does not mean that the science of the thought process, or the thought process itself, has reached its uttermost limits. On the contrary: We have not yet really begun to think. Further social advances will inevitably produce tremendous advances in human thought and practice and in the knowledge of human thought.
Before Marx and Engels, logic, the science of the thought process, played a subordinate role in the historical process. As these scientific socialists taught, neither thought nor the self-consciousness of thought has determined the development of society, but the blind play of natural and social forces. But now mankind has begun to understand the logical course of natural processes and to master and use them. With the socialist movement we have also begun to comprehend the logic of the historical thought processes themselves. With the growth of socialism, logic will and must become a greater and greater power in shaping the
course of social development. As natural and social forces are brought increasingly under the sway of planned and collectively organised human action, thought and the science of thought will undoubtedly expand its content, develop new forms, exhibit new properties and powers. Dialectical logic is the indispensable instrument for promoting the progress of scientific thought to this superior level. Materialist dialectics opens out limitless perspectives for the future of human thought.