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

9. On Hegel's Logic

“Three Members” of Logic

“‘Nature, this immediate totality, unfolds itself in the Logical Idea and Mind.’ Logic is the science of cognition. It is the theory of knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of nature by man. But this is not a simple, not an immediate, not a complete reflection, but the process of a series of abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws, etc., and these concepts, laws, etc. (thought, science = “the logical Idea”) embrace conditionally, approximately, the universal law-governed character of eternally moving and developing nature. Here there are actually, objectively, three members: 1) nature; 2) human cognition = the human brain (as the highest product of this same nature), and 3) the form of reflection of nature in human cognition, and this form consists precisely of concepts, laws, categories, etc.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 182)

Lenin was opposed to the typical view of “logic” as being simply “the science of external forms of thought.” Of course, he recognized that “logic is the science of cognition,” but he raises the question of what human cognition is to begin with. This, he says, is nothing more than “the reflection of nature by man”! Thus, the movement of “logic” = concepts (or cognition) must reflect the principles of nature and the movement of the objective world. “The formation of (abstract) notions and operations with them already includes idea, conviction, consciousness of the law-governed character of the objective connection to the world.” (Philosophical Notebooks p. 178)

Therefore, the development of Hegel’s logic, in other words the movement of categories, is both the course of natural science as well as economics, and to this extent “Hegel’s dialectic is a generalization of the history of thought.” (Ibid. p. 316)

Hegel considered “the logical idea, nature, and sprit” to be the three aspects of philosophy, but Lenin instead lists “nature, human cognition, and its forms. Fundamentally there is nature (the objective world) and human cognition that reflects this. The movement of categories and concepts is the movement (development) of human cognition, which reflects nature, comes closer to nature, and expresses its nodal point.

Significance of Hegel's Logic

“But the basic idea is one of genius: that of the universal, all-sided, vital connection of everything with everything and the reflection of this connection…in human concepts, which must likewise be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 146)

The dialectics of Hegel’s “Idea” or a concept is created through the dialectics of a real thing, and is its reflection. The connections, movement and contradictions of categories (concepts) make up the main content of logic, but this is shown as the reflection of the objective world. Hegel criticized the typical formalism and “dualism” of logic which only considers thought as a subjectivistic and formalistic activity, while viewing the objective thing opposing thought as something fixed that exists independently. He called this an approach lacking in thought.  In his study of the dialectics of categories -- the forms and laws of logic ? Hegel, as the result of his rational pursuit, inevitably comes close to materialism (naturally and unconsciously). The dialectics of categories is a question not merely of an “empty, outer shell,” but rather is connected to the objective world (i.e. the question of thought dialectically unfolding towards objectivity and the cognition of laws existing within objectivity). Thus, Hegel’s study of the dialectics of concepts (= logic) necessarily leads to a consideration of the dialectics of the objective world. This is the genius of Hegel, the true meaning of his logic, and at the same time its limitation. Marx gave a materialistic and rational form to this “consideration.” In other words, Marx “turned Hegel on his head.”

Hegel's Logic and Marx's Capital

“If Marx did not leave behind him a ‘Logic’ (with a capital letter), he did leave the logic of Capital, and this ought to be utilized to the full in this question. In Capital, Marx applied to a single science logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge of materialism [three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing] which has taken everything valuable in Hegel and developed it further.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 317)

Marx, while learning the essential points of Hegel’s logic, wrote Capital instead of rewriting or reformulating this logic. Rather than studying the dialectics of abstract concepts and categories in general, Marx dialectically studied the objective world. In other words, he carried out a concrete analysis of concepts applied to the relations of reality. Marx aim and task was to summarize the capitalist production relations, such as value, money and capital, and analyze the living, real concepts that appear, as well as the reciprocal relationships of these concepts, their movement and transformations. The standpoints of Marx and Hegel are fundamentally opposed (materialism and idealism), but still on this point they clearly have an internal relationship to each other. Lenin saw Capital as the “application” of logic in the following way: “The beginning -- the most simple, ordinary, mass, immediate ‘Being’: the single commodity (‘Sein’ in political economy). The analysis of it as a social relation. A double analysis, deductive and inductive -- logical and historical (forms of value).” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 318)

There are some philosophers who criticize Lenin for viewing logic, dialectics, and cognition as all being the same thing, but this is because they have adopted the standpoint of typical pre-Hegelian logic in which logic is a “subjective form” that is severed formally from the objective world. Certainly logic is the study of the external forms of thought. For Hegel, however, even if logic takes this form, included within it is the totality, summation and conclusions of the history of the cognition of the world and the generalization of the history of thought. In other words, it includes objective dialectics. Hegel’s concept of the dialect reflects the dialectic of the objective world, and presupposes it (unconsciously). In this sense, logic is not limited to epistemology, but is also synonymous with dialectics. The core of Hegel’s logic is dialectics. Engels’ emphasized this on numerous occasions (in Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Duhring) and said that, “For philosophy, which has been expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of pure thought (so far as it is left): the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics.” (Ludwig Feuerbach, International Publishers, p. 59) Dialectics is synonymous with Hegel’s logic, and even today this is still the case. Humanity has no other concept of dialectics apart from the dialectics in Hegel’s logic. The dialectics of Marx, Engels and Lenin can be called a summation of Hegel’s dialectics.

Criticism of Plekhanov

“Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism (and agnosticism in general) more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialistic standpoint, insofar as he merely rejects their views as limine [from the threshold], but does not correct them (as Hegel corrected Kant), deepening, generalizing and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 179)

Lenin criticized Plekhanov for not paying attention to the dialectics as epistemology of Marxism, and having nothing to say about Hegel’s science of logic (i.e. regarding the topic of dialectics as philosophical science). Materialism with such a defect was not true dialectical materialism, but rather “vulgar materialism.” The vulgar materialism of the Second International was unable to offer an intrinsic criticism of Kant, neo-Kantians, and Machists. On this point, vulgar materialism was a stage below Hegel. Plekhanov did not pay sufficient attention to the aspect of dialectics as the “unity of opposites,” explaining this as the “summation of examples” rather than as “a law of cognition (and as a law of the objective world).” (Ibid. p. 357) This view amounts to rejecting the understanding of dialectics.

Lenin’s critique of Plekhanov contains to a certain extent his reflection on Materialism and Emperio-Criticism. That is, Lenin can be said to be offering the self-criticism that only clarifying the basis of epistemology -- whether matter or mind should be taken as primary -- is insufficient, and that this will not lead to an intrinsic sublation of the Machists. Of course, this does not mean that Lenin was an “objectivist” in the past (some leftwing philosophers have offered this criticism of Lenin, which is silly and reactionary since all materialists are “objectivists” in a sense), but merely that he had not paid due consideration to “the original dialectics as a philosophical science.”

Categories of Logic and Human Practice

“When Hegel endeavors…to bring man’s purposive activity under the categories of logic, saying that this activity is the ‘syllogism,’ that the subject (man) plays the role of a ‘member’ in the logical “figure” of the ‘syllogism,’ and so on,  --  Then that is not merely stretching a point, a mere game. This has a very profound, purely materialistic content. It has to be inverted: The practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the repetition of the various logical figures of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms.” (Philosophical Notebooks, Collected Works vol. 38, p. 190)

When Lenin found this effort of Hegel he couldn’t help letting out a cheer. The opinion of Lenin here is the same as in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism where he emphasized that the standard of truth is human practice. There Lenin defends the Marxist proposition that truth is “verified” through practice and emphasizes the close connection between materialist epistemology and practice. “Human practice proves the correctness of the materialist theory of knowledge, said Marx and Engels, who dubbed all attempts to solve the fundamental question of epistemology without the aid of practice ‘scholastic’ and ‘philosophical fancies.’…Knowledge can be useful biologically, useful in human practice, useful for the preservation of life, for the preservation of species, only when it reflects an objective truth independent of man. For the materialists the ‘success’ of human practice proves the correspondence between our ideas and the objective nature of the things we perceive.” (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism pp. 138-9)

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