Lenin's “Own Words”(Part Three: Philosophy and Worldview)

8. On Dialectics

The Core of Dialectics

“The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the ‘essentials,’ one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics. That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter…The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their ‘unity,’ -- although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here. In a certain sense both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in a phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society). The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites…The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.” (“On the Question of Dialectics,” Collected Works vol. 38, p. 359-60)

Drawing on Hegel who saw the essence of dialectical thought as the grasping of two opposing moments in their identity (unity),” Lenin also saw the core of dialectics as the identity (unity) of opposites. Dialectics has been called “nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought. (Engels, Anti-Duhring) Lenin, of course, did not disagree with this definition. However, following Hegel, as well as considering the ancient tradition of dialectics, Lenin sought the core of dialectics in the “unity of opposites.”

This “unity of opposites” is not merely metaphysical harmony or the logic of vulgar eclecticism. Rather, this raises the question of why it is possible for something that is divided and contradictory to be united, under what conditions this occurs, and why a thing can have unity even while being reciprocally transformed. Take, for example, the basic human understanding of the term “my house.” The individual (my house) and the universal (house in general) are in opposition, but at the same time in unity. The individual can only exist through the universal, just as the universal can only exist through the individual. In this way we have an identity (unity) in opposites, a reciprocal movement and transformation. In this way, dialectics can be said to be a characteristic of human cognition.

Furthermore, this “unity in opposites” includes the internal development of cognition, and is its motive force. The same can be said for nature. This is not a gradual or circular type of development, but rather is a development that includes the disappearance of the old thing and appearance of something new, and is characterized by leaps, an interruption of gradualness, and the transformation into opposite.

Dialectics as the Explanation of Development

“Nowadays, the idea of development, of evolution, has penetrated the social consciousness almost in its entirety, but by other ways, not through Hegelian philosophy. But as formulated by Marx and Engels basing themselves on Hegel, this idea is far more comprehensive, far richer in content than the current idea of evolution. A development that seemingly repeats the stages already passed, but repeats them differently, on a higher basis (“negation of negation”), a development, so to speak, in a spiral, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; ‘interruptions of gradualness’; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses to development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon (history constantly discloses ever new sides), a connection that provides a uniform, law-governed, universal process of motion -- such are some of the features of dialectics as a richer (than the ordinary) doctrine of development. (On Marx and Engels, Foreign Language Press, pp. 12-13)

Dialectics if the principle of ultimate development -- “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.” (Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach) Today the philosophy that nature and society are forever developing and moving has entered the social consciousness and been generally accepted -- albeit in a vulgarized form -- but this philosophy was not the possession of humanity from the outset. During the Christian dominated middle ages, the world was seen as an unchanging system in which everything was created by God. During the period from the 15th to 18th century -- when capitalism had emerged but not yet fully developed and science and productive power were still at a low level -- the dominant philosophical method, which Hegel called metaphysics, took “objects of investigation [as] fixed, rigid, given once for all.” (Engels, Anti-Duhring)  In this period a mechanical worldview was dominant, and the view of the world as development and change was hidden in the shadows.

However, with the discovery of the cell, the law of energy transformation, Darwin’s theory of evolution, etc., humanity was given an awareness of development, and the concept arose of the interconnection and reciprocity and interaction within nature. It was Hegel, above all others, who seriously constructed a system of this philosophy of development, and it was Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin, who connected this to materialism to give it a truly rational appearance.

According to Lenin, there are “two basic conceptions of development (evolution).” One is the bourgeois liberal view of evolution as being gradual and reformist, while the other view sees evolution as a “leap,” in terms of the transformation from quantity to quality. The former is a dead, ossified view of evolution, while the latter “furnishes the key to the ‘self-movement’ of everything existing.” (“On the Question of Dialectics”) The former is the worldview of the bourgeoisie, while the latter is the worldview of the proletariat.

Dialectics of Cognition

“Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract -- provided it is correct -- does not get way from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice,  -- such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is the knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 171)

The consciousness of abstract and universal things is “full of contradictions.” In one aspect this is the more profound and correct reflection of nature or society. The concept of value clearly contains a more correct understanding than the concept of price of concrete commodity production relations. On the other hand, however, something abstract is lifeless and “pure,” and still one-dimensional, since it is only the first step towards a concrete, overall understanding. Human beings cannot know a concrete thing immediately and all at once. But through the limitless aggregation of abstract concepts and various laws, humanity can ceaselessly draw closer to the complete figure of a concrete thing.

Ultimately human cognition is also a perpetual process of movement. The approach of thought to the object (in other words, cognition) is a process of movement and development, and an unceasing process of the generation of contradictions and their solution. Cognition is also necessarily penetrated by dialectical laws.

Negation in Dialectics

“Not empty negation, not futile negation, not skeptical negation, vacillation and doubt is characteristic and essential in dialectics, -- which undoubtedly contains the element of negation and indeed as its most important element -- no, but negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development, retaining the positive, i.e., without any vacillations, without any eclecticism.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 225)

Dialectics is the logic of negation. But, as Hegel pointed out, this negation is not an extrinsic negative action that is alien to the thing negated. Engels compared this negation to the example of barley. If the grains of barley are crushed and then consumed they are thereby “negated” -- that is, the barley’s existence as a grain is ended. On the other hand, however, if a grain of barley is instead planted within the soil, it can germinate and grow so that the grain is in turn “negated” by the plant. In the first case, the negation of the grain is its simple annihilation, not its negation as a moment of development, and this is “empty” or “futile” negation, or a nonsensical and arbitrary negation. Only the second negation is a dialectical negation.

The logic of this dialectical negation has extremely important practical significance. For instance, out of the Russian Revolution sprang a movement of so-called “proletarian culture.” This emerged as the anti-thesis to the aristocratic and bourgeois culture of the former class society, but -- as witnessed by the slogan “Burn Raphael” -- this was a simple negation of class culture, and a movement whose essence was the negation of anarchy. Lenin was critical of those “ultra-leftists” who sought the negation of past culture in terms of eliminating it completely, pointing out that “Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture.” (“On Proletarian Culture,” Collected Works vol. 31, p. 317) Indeed, the dialectical manner of negation is the only truly revolutionary means of negating reality.

Dialectics vs. Sophistry and Eclecticism

“Since everything has ‘mehrere’ -- ‘Inhaltsbestimmungen, Verhaltnisse und Rucksichten,’ [‘multiple’ -- ‘content determinations, relations and considerations’] so any number of arguments can be put forward. This is what Socrates and Plato called sophistry. Such arguments do not contain ‘the whole extent of the thing,’ they do not ‘exhaust’ it (in the sense of ‘constituting its connections’ and ‘containing all’ its sides).” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 146)

Here Lenin discusses the meaning of sophistry. Every thing has many determinations. For example, a strike can be viewed as part of the development of the class struggle of the workers, or seen as a minus for workers if it is expected to be suppressed, or in other cases as a “challenge.” Even the same strike has multiple “content-determinations, relations and considerations.” For this reason, any number of arguments for or against a strike can be devised. Since any strike can have the “hint” of a challenge or the “fear” of reprisal, this can be employed as a reason to oppose a strike. The JCP used such a reason to oppose the general strike of April 17, 1946. Of course, to ignore the question of the “whole extent of the thing” in terms of the development of the class struggle, and just look at one aspect of the strike, is nothing but the logic of sophistry.

Moreover, the so-called anti-JCP “new left” also has many “content determinations.” They have been viewed as believers in Trotsky, as “tools” of bourgeois state power, as being financed by some rightwing elements, or as advocates of violence who are fighting against bourgeois state power. To not give serious consideration to the matter and grasp the necessary content and connections of the new left, taking instead one element separated from the whole -- for example to aruge that they since they call for the “overthrow” of the JCP they are no different from the LDP and reactionaries, and can thus be called counter-revolutionaries -- would be an example of the reasoning of a sophist. The new left ideologue Kuroda Kan’ichi has declared that the philosophical basis for the Stalinist Communist Party is “objectivism,” but the most salient characteristic of the logic of the Communist Party today is fact it is the abandonment of dialectics and embracing of sophistry (dogmatism and metaphysics -- i.e. the reverting back to pre-Hegelian stage).

Lenin used the term eclecticism to refer to arbitrarily taking some aspects of a thing and randomly joining them together, or the standpoint of reconciling two or more different things that have been placed parallel to each other. He emphasized that “if we are to have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and ‘mediacies.’” (“Once Again on the Trade Unions” Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 94). In terms of appearance, dialects may resemble eclecticism and sophistry, but they are essentially different and in opposition. As Lenin points out: “All-sided, universal flexibility of concepts, a flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites, -- that is the essence of the matter. This flexibility, applied subjectively = eclecticism and sophistry. Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e., reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, is dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world.” (Philosophical Notebooks, p. 110)

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